


A Little Christmas Cheer Never Hurt Anyone (Except for maybe Q)

by GiveUpResistance



Category: James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: Angst (I guess), Christmas, Eve totally ships 00Q secretly, M/M, Pre Skyfall, Q has a name (because a whole lot of it happens before he is Q), Q is an orphan, Q's past, post Skyfall
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-05
Updated: 2014-01-01
Packaged: 2018-01-03 13:30:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 26
Words: 30,770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1071030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GiveUpResistance/pseuds/GiveUpResistance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Q despises Christmas. Nothing good ever happens at this time of year, not for the (almost) 25 years that he's been alive, and this isn't going to be any different. But at least they're all just memories now, and things can hardly get worse.<br/>Twenty five (kind of) vignettes of Christmas Past and Present for Q and one of New Year's Eve</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The First (2013)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I started this a little late, but I intend to write twenty five short stories spanning Q's life and the reasons for his negative associations with Christmas. (And maybe some 00Q hints towards the end.) Thanks to sivvywrites on tumblr for beta reading and title help :) Obviously I don't own anything.  
> Also, a song for this chapter is 'I'm Not Really in the Christmas Mood This Year' by Foxtails Brigade

December the 1st, 2013

Age 24

****

Q stops short less than a metre through the door into Q Branch. His legs freeze; his heart stutters at the sight that greets him.

For anyone else, it would have been normal, joyous, even; however, to him, the Christmas tree in the corner is anything but.

"Q!" Jenny stands up from a kneeling position beside it, tucking a golden ornament over a dark green branch. "Good morning."

He manages a kind of half smile on one half on his face, not reaching his eyes, and nods. "Decorations going up so soon?"

She grins brightly. "It's the first, sir. Officially the holiday season, now."

"Right." He hides a grimace and strides hurriedly to his office on the other side of the room. Once inside, he shuts the door and calls up the extractor fans to remove the lingering scent of pine from the air.

Much better.

He could, he muses as he leans back in his chair, order for no decorations to be put up, possibly under the excuse that they were distracting, or something similar, but he doesn't want to ruin their fun with his gloomy attitude towards the holiday. Plus, his doing so would arouse their curiosity without a doubt, and having a team of computer specialists trying to dig into his past would not end well despite all of his careful precautions.

He can do this.

He can get through this, and no one would ever know his aversion to all things Christmas, or his reasons.

Christmas has begun, and in his head he's back to being Isaac Samuels.

* * *

****

He barely leaves the safety of his office for most of the day, checking up on the 00 agents who are currently in the field (what he wouldn't give to have that as an excuse not to celebrate) and putting together a couple of prototypes for his latest ideas.

His windows are blacked out, so he can't see any decorations, and it's easy enough to ignore them whenever someone knocks with a refill of his tea.

Unfortunately, Eve turns up at her lunch hour and drags him outside.

He had assumed that the ceiling was a safe place to look, that it would be devoid or adornment, but no.

There are _streamers_.

Before he closes his eyes, he catches a glimpse of all the technicians and 007 watching as he is hauled away.

 

In Eve’s car he tries not to think of the embarrassment on having his underlings and Bond watching Eve pull him away (not that it doesn’t happen, but usually he either fights back or goes along willingly, so his reaction is possibly another anomaly which could possibly alert them to the fact that something is wrong, so he’ll have to lay some groundwork for an excuse to fix that somehow.) Bond probably didn’t notice - even if he does spend a reasonably amount of time in Q Branch (not)returning his equipment and flirting with technicians, he doesn’t know Q like the the others do.

Not that they know much, now that he thinks about it.

“Q? Everything okay?” Eve asks from the seat beside him.

“Yeah, just a little tired.” He fakes a yawn and sits up straighter in the seat.

“Hey, I could take you home if you want, nobody would mind if you took a little time off, you know. As long as you were available in an emergency.”

He shakes his head. “No, I think I can handle it. As long as lunch is good, anyway.”

She flashes a grin and pulls sharply on the steering wheel, sliding neatly into parking space about ternty metres from the restaurant that she had named back at the office. For the millionth time, Q wonders whether Bond taught her how to drive. Bloody mad drivers, the both of them. “Don’t worry, the food is good here.”

 

Lunch isn't too bad, actually, seeing as it's a nice restaurant, which hasn't bowed to the commercialised holiday.

While Eve is a darling, and she probably knows more about him than anyone else still in MI6 apart from M and perhaps Tanner, (and Psych, but nobody gives two fucks about them), she still only knows the general facts of his childhood and parts of the more recent years. He's worked far too hard at keeping this particular part of him from everyone for her to see it now. So her conversation, when it isn't business and colleagues and men, continues to come around to the holiday (which many of them don't actually get, being members of the secret service,) and presents and celebration and not so subtly wondering what (who) Q is doing for the day.

He deflects her with some crap about preferring to celebrate by himself. Well, he will be by himself, so he's not totally lying, now, is he? He feels a bit guilty for it, because it's possible that she is also going to be all alone for Christmas, but he doesn't dare ask, because on the 25th there is no fucking way that he's going to pretend that he enjoys all this shit.

 

They say a cheerful goodbye outside the door to Q Branch and then she strides off to order someone about, and Q has to stare at his phone like he's doing something extremely important so that he doesn't have to see the green and red and gold all around as he walks through it all.

Unfortunately there's no national or international emergencies going on - well, no more than usual - so he can't avoid people forever. Not that he could avoid everyone for a whole month.

Still, what he can do is stay in his office and not leave until the only beings left in the section is the skeleton night staff, and the only lights are the glow of their computer screens.

MI6 is pretty quiet as he leaves - as quiet as it gets, anyway - and it's late enough that the drive back to his flat doesn't take too long.

He thanks the driver, who is actually one of the bodyguard/odd-job men that MI6 seem to hire en masse (like a discounted package of men with muscles, military training and enough brains to protect an asset on home territory).

Once inside, he slides on a pair of headphones and sets his music playing. The beats and melodies force his body to keep ticking, to just keep going while he heats up a microwave meal and eats it, enough to get him calm enough that he can get to sleep within a couple of hours of lying down.

At least that's the plan.

But the awful feelings that come with this time of year are rising up, the memories, the stupidity of life and everything-

Now that he looks back on things, all those stupid memories and bad times are just that - stupid - but even now that he can acknowledge that, the associations remain, implanted by almost 25 years of terrible things (even if he can't remember the first few). He still doesn't know how to cope.

He knows that he can't allow himself to get melancholy, not already - it's only the first day, after all, and he is in a better place than he has been any other year (except, perhaps, the last, but he can't think about that now) and he needs to get through for that, at least.

He just needs to let go of the past.

He knows that it's not easy, and he's tried before, but maybe this time things will be different. Maybe this time he can relax and _forget_.

But his body is still tense, and his mind won't be distracted from anything long enough for him to detach and fall asleep.

Eventually he gives in and gives up, slipping from his bed and making his way to the kitchen. He finds the lonely bottle of scotch high up in one of the cupboards, tucked away for a night just like this.

When he sees the time he realises that he has given in too early, but he's been awake longer than he would be on a normal day if there's nothing happening at work, and he prizes his sleep when there are no jobs to be done.

So he pours a generous measure into his glass and downs it in time to see the clock on the microwave flick over to 00:00.

**Only twenty four days.**


	2. The Second (1994)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry. This hasn't actually been beta'd but I need to post it and I'll edit it with corrections later once someone gets back to me.  
> sorry sorry sorry but writing has happened and is happening and I should stop posting while I'm high on feels

In general, primary school wasn't too bad, at least in the first few years.

With nothing else to do, he had taught himself to read as soon as he figured out that that was what books were for.

And then he devoured anything he could get his hands on. Words that he didn't understand he could look up in the dictionary.

So he read when he was bored from a young age and when he began school he found that the other children couldn't - none of them, so he felt more the odd one out than clever - and he was terrible at drawing but at least he could write letters and numbers with some degree of proficiency, and the teacher seemed to like not being bothered over that, so he would sit and try to read random books that he found in the classroom, even if they didn't make that much sense.

And maths just seemed to click in his brain, sums were easy and why did he want to know how many theoretical oranges he had - but that was what he had to do so he would calculate and then sit back and watch the other children through the thick glasses perched on his nose.

 

December the 2nd, 1994

Age 5

 

"Now," said the teacher cheerfully. "It is the second day of December, which means - who can tell me how many days it is until Christmas? Twenty five take away two."

There was a short silence before a quiet voice on the other side of the room says, "Twenty three?"

"That's right, Carr! So today we're going to start making a Christmas card for our mummy or daddy! How does that sound?"

There were some enthusiastic cheers from some of the other kids, because behind the teacher they could see the coloured card and paint and glitter. Others were less obviously excited, but everyone still smiled at the thought of making the best card for their parents.

Everyone but Isaac.

He sat still as the rest of the class rushed forward to grab the lie favourite art supplies. But what was he supposed to do? He didn't have parents. These was Mrs Garner, who ran the foster home, and Miss Todd and Miss Rainer who helped out, but they weren't his parents.

Parents loved you, supposedly.

That's what it sounded like from his classmates and his books and the other children at home who still had memories of their parents.

"Isaac?" He looked up to see the teacher leaning down towards him. "Aren't you going to make a card?"

He shook his head. "I don't have a mum or dad."

"I know, sweetie, but you could still make a card for Mrs Garner, right?"

"Why?"

"Because we want her to have a nice Christmas, right? And getting a card is always nice."

"I guess..."

She smiled broadly. "Of course it is. Come on, get some things to make it with. She'll love it."

Reluctantly, he joined the cluster of children and grabbed a piece of red card as soon as he could, getting away from the rest.

He wrote the message inside painstakingly, forming the letters as well as he could. It said, quite simply, 'Thank you for caring for me. merry christmas'

 

When he gives the card to Mrs Garner that afternoon, she smiles and thanks him and says that she'll put it away safely in her bedroom.

When he leaves the kitchen, he takes a peak through the door just in time to see her shake her head and drop the card into the bin.

He doesn't cry.

But on his way back to the room he shares with a boy a little older than him, he decides that it's not worth it, not when he knows where his effort will go.

Next time he will make something for the other children, and it will be better, so that they can appreciate it.

Hopefully.


	3. The Third/Lights (2006)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this morning when I planned to write the bulk of the rest of it, the power went out. Ugh. It's back on now, and I'm going to post again today probably.  
> I kind of/not really have a playlist of (mostly) christmas music (that I don't hate) for this story, so for some chapters I might post a link to a song as well, they don't necessarily have anything to do with the chapter.  
> For this chapter the song is The Christmas Song by The Raveonettes.  
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUiZRWsIGAY

December the 3rd, 2006

Age 17

 

Isaac, like any teenager with anxiety problems and mental disorders that he doesn't want to consider the existence of, has trouble sleeping.

He assumes that the problem is that he thinks too much, which is probably true, because his mind does just keep ticking no matter what, despite everything he does to slow it down or keep it occupied.

So he's thankful when his room is pitch black and he has music blasting in his headphones.

In some ways this doesn't make sense, shouldn't make sense, this depriving of one sense and gorging another shouldn't help him fall asleep, but it does.

It's probably to do with the 'working mode' when he's coding or writing some shitty essay, which is likely brought on by the visual stimulation provided by the lights of his computer screen.

Whatever it is that makes his brain work, having anything even remotely bright around definitely stops him from sleeping.

Which is why he's just about ready to go next door and shoot the fucking owners of the fucking house across the road in their brainless little heads.

Their house is lit up like a landing strip at an airport if they decided to blind the fucking pilots.

There is no accurate metaphor.

There are fairy lights covering the roof, in lines that give the impression that phosphorescent water is trickling down. There are light displays in the windows facing out onto the street, spotlights in the trees spinning and making patterns on the facade of the house and the garden and the road.

There is a fucking Christmas tree made out of lights standing in the middle of the lawn-

And light up reindeer statues.

All in all, it’s like a giant on acid has thrown a whole lot of lights at the entire house and then said 'hey, this isn't burning people's retinas yet, I'll add some more.'

And it's two am and he has to get up at five and he can't sleep.

Earlier he tried getting some work done, but it's too hard because he keeps getting distracted and he can't focus on things properly and it sucks balls.

But maybe, if he had a proper purpose, he could concentrate long enough to do just one thing, right?

Sighing, he opens up his laptop again and logs on with a few quick keystrokes.

Screwing his eyes up tight one more time, willing to fall asleep now if he's going to in the next while, and when he doesn't do so, cracks each finger one by one (who cares if he'll get arthritis, they're his bloody fingers) and sets to work.

It's a sign of how exhausted he must be that the streams of characters are calming, rather than eliciting the usual excitement of a challenge.

Or maybe his computer and programs and codes have become more of a home than his own body.

Whatever the reason, he falls into the work, lets his fingers fly across the keyboard as his mind roams, slipping in and out of sanity as the lights from outside flash on the walls of his room and his eyes and his mind.

Somehow, he does it.

He presses a button and suddenly everything is delightfully, blissfully dark.

There are no lights flashing outside.

Nothing, absolutely no brightness around, nothing glowing except for his laptop screen, which he has the power to close and does so.

It's so dark that even when his eyes are open there is no difference to them being closed.

Even when his glasses have been cast to the side and his head is lying on the pillow there is nothing except a reminder in his kind to make some blackout curtains tomorrow.

Nothing but a black canvas and a slow steady beat in his ears.

Nothing.

 

He wakes, rested and at ease.

Which he really shouldn't be, given the time that he was awake until the night - morning? - before.

Grabbing his glasses and looking at his alarm clock, he finds that it's flashing.

03:34

When he checks his phone, it tells him that it's actually 6:58 am, which means that the clock turned on at 3:28 am, which means that the power...

Shit

He attempts to scramble out of bed at the same time as opening his laptop to check what exactly he did last night, but all that ends up happening is that he slips on a cardigan and lands back on the bed, computer resting on his chest.

And the evidence is right there in front of him.

He'd meant to just black out the one house last night.

But in his exhausted stupor he'd forgotten something.

Somebody was going to be very angry about losing power everywhere within a three kilometre radius.

 


	4. The Fourth (2005)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song for this chapter: 80 Windows by Nada Surf

December the 4th, 2005

Age 16

 

Another problem with this stupid fucking holiday is the way people act.

Even before it gets properly cold, they begin to huddle together, the families, the couples, even the friends.

They lean into each other, a support that they don't actually need, but can enjoy and still not fully appreciate.

They look in the windows of shops with desire in their eyes, laugh and giggle at the items which they want and don't want and need and don't need.

He sees them at school and in the park and while working the checkout at the crappy, his stupid dead end job.

He's not sure which people he hates the most.

Families are pretty bad, but he's had a longer time living with wanting that kind of touch, and so a longer time to get used to it.

The couples, however, are absolutely awful.

The young ones are either shy or lovey-dovey, holding hands and not looking each other in the eye or sneaking a feel of waists and chests and arses.

As the age of the couple rises, there are still the same types of people, but things are more casual, an easy, relaxed kind of comfort in their touches and interactions, the way some of them will burst out in laughter without a care and then look at their partner, unnoticed, that says much more than any speech would.

There are people of all ages whose eyes behold the world in their lover, no matter how clichéd it is.

No matter the stage of their relationship, it hurts.

They're all touching each other with affection or love or lust and Isaac has trouble /shaking hands/ for god's sake.

And friends - it's not like he has many, not that he's really attempted to form any kind of workable relationship since moving homes last year. Which is purely to do with the fact that he probably wasn't going to be around for long (in fact he's lasted a lot longer than he had thought he would, seeing as he's been in this particular place for almost a year now).

Its not like he has any kind of reluctance when it comes to people and relationships. It isn't as if his mind flashes back every time he attempts anything more than a formal touch.

It isn't as if an acquaintance brushing against him makes him flinch away, makes him shiver.

That's what he likes to think.

At times, like now, when he starts on this train of thought, he wonders what would happen if he stopped lying to himself so blatantly, admitted his stupid problems and got the fuck over it.

In some ways he wants to try, but in others he is far to weak, he finds it too difficult to face, his stupidity. Because that's all it is, his own superstition and idiocy holding him in place.

Keeping him from others and normality.

It makes him depressed and his heart aches and his fingers twitch towards empty air.

He is jealous.

It is impossible to and not to admit.

 

There's a cough from beside him and Isaac realises that there's a customer waiting to be served and his supervisor is glaring at him threateningly.

"Sorry, I hope you weren't waiting too long, I got caught up in my thoughts-"

"It's no problem."

The low voice kind of catches him off guard, and he looks up to see a slightly older guy with dark brown hair take the final few steps to stand in front of his counter.

"Hey, cutie."

Isaac nods and tries to smile like management wants him to, saying 'Hi' in return.

He scans the boxes of chocolate quickly and says "£12.70."

The man hands over £15 and while Q is getting his change, speaks. "Sorry, it's just that you are totally cute, I didn't mean to offend-"

"It's fine. I'm not offended." He risks a small smile at the other man and is rewarded with a grin.

"My name's Cameron."

Isaac nods and points to his name tag. "Nice to meet you. Do you want a receipt?"

"Yes please."

He prints the transaction and hands it over, only for Cameron to take the pen which is used by customers for signing credit card receipts and scribble on the back of the paper briefly before passing it back.

"Call me." Cameron winks as he walks away, and all Isaac can do is stare after him for a long while.

Luckily there's nobody waiting, so he can just not do anything for a moment but try to process the fact that someone just hit on him.

Even if it was at work.

He puts it out of his mind when a customer comes along, but at the end of his shift his mind drifts back to the piece of paper sitting heavy in his pocket.

He supposes he could call.

He was rather handsome, and seemed okay - okay enough that Isaac could at least get a coffee.

Goddammit, he has to at least try.

His supervisor, all frowning and annoyed looking, stops him on his way out. "You should not talk to people familiarly while working."

Isaac sighs. "You mean I shouldn't let a guy flirt with me."

Her jaw clenches. "I hope you threw that man's phone number away. I am aware that you need this job, and it would be terrible if you went up against company code." She stalked away, leaving Isaac with his jaw hanging open at the threat.

Well, now he had to call.

 


	5. The Fifth (2000)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a note in case you haven't realised - in all chapters set before he becomes Q, I call him Isaac.
> 
> Hope you enjoy :) (or not, you know, whatever)

December the 5th, 2000

Age 11

 

Secret Santa. Kris Kringle.

Whatever it was called, Isaac hated it.

Seriously, drawing a random name out of a hat and having to give them a present.

When his teacher had explained the rules the morning before he had thought that it was stupid, and he still did now that she was handing around the box of names.

He has to buy something crappy (there's a £5 limit on the gift price) for someone that he probably doesn't like, and then someone who probably doesn't like him is going to be doing the same thing.

Unfortunately, Isaac doesn't have £5, or parents that will give it to him.

So he has absolutely no idea how he's going to pay for this.

People either beam or groan as they get the name of the student that they have to buy for, but, very surprisingly, Isaac's pick, Taylor, actually isn't too bad. She's actually kind of nice to Isaac - well, she's nice to everyone - and she seems the kind to be okay about whatever she gets.

But he still has to get the money.

 

When he tells his friends Mick and Carr, they're both terribly jealous, seeing as they've each got one of the bitchier girls in the class. But, as Carr points out in her matter of fact way, at least they can get them something seriously crap and not care, whereas Isaac wants to be able to give a gift that's not too bad.

 

The only thing that Isaac knows he is good at is fixing things.

He doesn't remember how he got into it in the first place, only that he fixed the home's VCR player and recorder, and then various other pieces of electronic and mechanical equipment.

But after last year's debacle, they don't let him near anything.

At least the adults don't.

Many of the other children don't either, in case they get found out and punished, but Isaac's roommate, Nathan, isn't exactly one for rules.

Q knows that despite the fact that the other boy is only a year older than him, he still takes part in a number of illegal activities which provide him with the cash to buy himself things that the rest of the children can't afford.

The carers simply turn a blind eye.

But Q can take advantage of that, because Nathan has a phone which he has been slowly hinting at Q to have a fiddle with and see what he can improve.

Fortunately, he can do something, after agreeing on a £10 flat fee, which is undercharging by a very large amount, but Isaac gets the money and has a little left over.

He does have trouble figuring out what to buy Taylor, because it's pretty bloody hard finding something that he thinks she would like that only costs £5.

He settles for chocolate.

Which turns out to be a pretty sensible idea, in fact, because when the class starts giving the presents out, and people open them, at least half are boxes of chocolate.

Taylor opens hers and looks pretty happy with it, beaming at everyone in general, as the giver of the presents haven't been revealed yet. She opens the box of chocolates and eats one, and then another, and seems to enjoy them, so Isaac sits back in his chair and relaxes, because all of this hasn't gone too badly at all.

Nobody pays much attention when Taylor coughs lightly a few minutes later. But then she coughs again, harder, and one of her friends asks her if she's okay.

She waves it off, but then she's taken in a fit of coughing, and Isaac realises that her lips are starting to swell. The friend picks up the box and looks at the ingredients. "She's allergic to peanuts, who the hell thought it was a good idea to give her these?"

They search for her adrenaline as her breathing gets harsher and there's nothing he can do but bolt out the door to the bathrooms and fall to the floor in time to heave his guts into the toilet bowl, because even if he didn't know, he should have, he should have found out and he's caused this and nothing good will ever come of him.

It's not the first time he realises this, but it is the first in conjunction with his friends and that hurts and has him retching once more.

He still can't get the awful feeling out of him when Mick finds him and says that Taylor's okay, or when Taylor pats him on the arm and tells him in a weak voice that its fine and she doesn't blame him at all because he wasn't to know.

He can allay the guilt slightly, however, by passing _his_ present off to one of the younger kids, because he knows now that he doesn't deserve it.

He just has to remember.


	6. The Sixth (2013)

December the 6th, 2013

Age 24

 

Q still has to leave his office to attend meetings, generally with M and/or Eve and/or Tanner, but he's beginning to steel himself to the reality of a decorated Q Branch.

However, he always secretly hopes that it will have miraculously disappeared by the time he leaves or comes back.

Unfortunately, on this occasion, like all of the others, it has not.

They add new things every day, and every day it seems like they can't fit any more, but somehow they always find a way.

In any other circumstance he would be rather proud of their resourcefulness, but does it have to come out in their Christmas decorating?

He grimaces at the sight of it all and prepares to move through it once more.

"Quartermaster?"

Q turns around, surprised. Hardly anyone calls him by that, apart from in formal situations.

The man standing there is relatively young, perhaps a couple of years older than Q himself.

"Yes?"

"Quartermaster, I'm Anthony Daretz."

He doesn't recognise the name, but then again, the only names he does know are of his Q Branchers, the agents, and heads of other divisions.

"I'm from Psych."

Q feels his body stiffen. "What do you want?"

"Nothing, don't worry."

Q raises an eyebrow. "Since when did Psych want nothing?"

"Just making sure you're okay."

That doesn't make him feel any better about what this guy is doing here. "I'm fine."

Daretz shakes his head. "I'm being serious. I know that you don't seem to have the best history with this month, and your birthday, and all that-"

Q attempts to stop his body trembling, but he can't, and he aches to hit him, but that would draw attention and people would wonder about what's going on, so he fucking can't, and he has to stand here and listen to everything that he doesn't want to hear, all the while hoping that nobody is in earshot.

"- so if you need to talk then you can come and see me, or one if the counsellors, you know, but you really should-"

"Q!"

He has never been so glad to hear 007's voice. He spins to face the direction of the call and sees the blond agent striding down the corridor towards him.

"What?" He shouts back, even though his normal speaking voice would carry well enough.

"Is that gun ready yet?" Bond sounds annoyed and demanding, but Q doesn't really mind, seeing as he has effectively saved him from the stupid Psych guy with his idiotic request.

"I told you that it wouldn't be ready for testing until later this week-"

"But I'm bored."

"Well it's your own bloody fault that you're stationed here for the next month, so get the fuck used to it."

"It was just a small airport-"

"There are consequences to blowing things up, 007. And someone is needed here just in case, you bloody well know that."

"And you promised that I could test prototypes-"

"I've got better things to do, you moron! I can't just drop everything to finish work on the gun!" He wouldn't actually need to do so, what with his dedication to work this past week, but nobody needs to know that.

"Well can you hurry up? I wouldn't want to get bored and accidentally blow something up over here, would I?"

Q glares at him for a moment before pushing past him, but Bond's attention span is so short that his gaze slips past him and even as he enters Q Branch and slams the door, hard, he can hear the agent saying, "Daretz, right? Now, I wanted to talk about my last evaluation..."

Q realises that he's breathing rather heavily after his almost-shouting match, but now at least he feels a little purged of his annoyance and everything, so perhaps 007 has helped him out more than he thought.

Not entirely for effect, though, he mutters, "Dickhead," under his breath as he heads back to his office, a little less bothered by the festivity when he compares it to the conversation with Daretz that he's just had.

And there goes his good mood.

 

Later, after he has cheered up a little by laughing at his exchange with Bond, whose conversation he usually enjoys, even when he's flirting (or though he doesn't like to admit it, especially when he's flirting).

So he makes some final adjustments to the prototype that he'd promised Bond, and gives it to a minion to pass on to the agent before he goes back to his office to do some actual work.

 

He leaves earlier than usual that evening, with a plan to watch non-Christmas reruns of idiotic television shows.

And literally almost runs into Anthony Daretz.

There's a moment of silence as they stare at each other, Q waiting for him to say something similar to earlier in the day (and planning to walk away without a word if he does so).

Instead the other man does something entirely unexpected. He bows his head and says, "I'm sorry." Q is still gaping a little when he continues with, "I shouldn't have said anything. I realise that now-"

Q snaps his jaw shut. "Just don't mention it again," he tells him brusquely, and turns to walk away, not acknowledging the "I won't!" from behind.

If he knew enough not to talk about it now, why the hell did he say anything before?"

Q curses loudly and kicks a door frame, only to then swear at himself for doing something so stupid.

Now he's in a crappy mood again and his foot hurts.

No point looking for alleviation until January at the earliest.

For now he'll just have to put up with his slow and stupid brain.


	7. The Seventh (2004)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry, Q.  
> A song that I like for this chapter is Hating You For Christmas by Everclear. (Nothing but the title has anything to do with the chapter, I just found it funny.)

December the 7th 2004

Age 15

 

Isaac doesn't actually know how they decide room allocations in the home, not that things ever stay how they arranged what with children being shuffled in and out of foster care, and very, very occasionally, adopted.

(It's only ever the babies, really, so all the rest of the children were orphaned or abandoned later in life, or are Isaac, with other circumstances preventing adoption.)

So sometimes he will have a new roommate, or they'll disappear to some other household, but the almost constant presence that he shares with is Nathan, who is just over a year older but has only been in the system for the last six years.

Isaac finds him rather arrogant and obnoxious, but he treats him a little more kindly than the rest of the older kids do, probably because he knows the Isaac is clever, with electronics and mechanics and he takes full advantage of that fact.

It had begun with the whole Secret Santa debacle, with Nathan taking advantage of his misery (Isaac wasn't so stupid that he doesn't see that was the case) and bribing him with the thought of money which he could use to help people.

Pretty soon he drags Isaac a reasonable way into the life of petty criminal activity.

Mostly Isaac just does some work on their phones and occasionally hacks into computer systems, learning as he goes.

Nathan takes most of the credit, and most of the money, but Isaac doesn't mind as much as he really, really should because Nathan smiles at him.

Really smiles, like he's pleased or proud or just happy to be around him, or happy that he's doing what Nathan wants, but the matter still stands that he is smiling at him. And barely anyone's smiled at him, not since a year or two ago, when Carr's father took custody of her and moved her to a better school, and Mick began hanging out with a tougher, cooler crowd at school.

So began his legally-dubious career.

He actually finds he enjoys it, at least the range of improvements he finds he can make to various devices and the reprogramming he can do on the laptop that Nathan finds for him.

And he enjoys the praise, which he gets so little of outside of maths class, and the attention-

Then Nathan kisses him.

It happens once, a grateful peck on his mouth when Isaac dismantles a phone and rebuilds it to appear to be a different model and number completely, and then Nathan disappears to give the phone back to one of his friends.

He sits, shocked, for several minutes, because he's never mentioned to anyone the issue of his sexuality, given that their foster parents are fairly religious. Also, up until this point in time he was fairly sure that Nathan was straight, given the amount of girls that he'd snuck in and out of the house over the years.

Then again, it's not like Nathan would advertise the fact that he liked guys too, (if he does), for exactly the same reason that Isaac doesn't do so either.

So he waits nervously for Nathan to come back, but he doesn't, not in time for dinner, anyway, and in fact its just about curfew (which Nathan never seems to particularly care about, anyway,) and Isaac is already in bed because he has school tomorrow when the door creaks open.

"Nathan?"

"You're still awake, Isaac?"

"Yeah." He waits for Nathan to flick the light on, but he doesn't and Isaac can only stare into the dark. "About earlier-"

"I didn't think you'd mind. I apologise if you did, I just couldn't help it."

"No, no- it was fine." He can feel himself blush in the darkness. "More than."

Nathan chuckles and Isaac can hear footsteps in the black.

Then he feels a hand on his cheek and lips pressing against his own, the light scratch of stubble as they slowly move.

When the lips leave Isaac finds himself leaning forward after them and Nathan laughs again.

"See you in the morning, Isaac."

He doesn't get to sleep for a while that night, shocked and excited and mind running to fast to be calm.

Over the next few weeks Nathan doesn't act any different to how he usually does, except for catching Isaac in private for a minute or two and kissing him hard and soft and fast and slow.

He learns slowly, he knows, but Nathan puts up with his poor kissing skills.

One night, when Mrs Garner is sick and everyone is too busy to check on the older kids, they take larger risk than usual and end up falling onto Isaac's bed, bodies touching through clothes as they kissed.

Fortunately, they hear footsteps down the hall in enough time for Nathan to scramble back to his own bed and they feign doing other things for when she pokes her head in and tells them to go to sleep.

It doesn't take much for Isaac to calculate that the most convenient time for anything to happen would be around Christmas, due to the many tasks that the staff have at that time of year.

He tells Nathan this with some trepidation, but the older boy just grins and kisses him soundly, swatting him on the arse on his way out of their bedroom.

And he seems to be fine with it, not pushing Isaac at all on this.

Its not until a week into December that they find a chance.

But then comes a night when everyone seems to be busy, and they won't be interrupted.

Nathan pulls him down onto the other boy's bed, so that Isaac is straddling him, then kisses him slowly. And even if he's a little nervous, he trusts Nathan right?

So he stays propped up on his knees and one hand while the other runs down the older boy's chest and slips beneath his jeans. It's odd to feel another guy's erection beneath his palm, but Nathan breaks their mouths apart long enough to hiss "Yes," as he does so and stretches the fingers at Isaac's neck into the curls at his nape.

Bolstered by this, Isaac lets his fingers curl around the length through Nathan's underwear.

It can't be too hard, he figures, seeing as he's used to doing this - only now it's on someone else, which is kind of weird when he thinks about it, but then Nathan's nails dig into his neck slightly and Isaac decides that the best thing to do would be to concentrate solely on giving this handjob.

So he does.

The first notice he gets that something is wrong is that the hands on his neck slide away and are on his chest, and suddenly he is pushed away with such force that he topples off of the small bed and onto the floor.

He regains his senses just in time to see Mrs Garner come through the door and hear Nathan shout, "Get off me, you faggot freak."

The matron grabs him by the arm and hauls him up, smacking him across the cheek. "How dare you do such ungodly things in this house! And during this time when we celebrate Jesus's sacrifice, you little-"

He's dragged away, locked into a tiny cupboard of a room that is only ever used when the home is full to the brim with children.

And all he can think is "Isaac, you sucker." Even though he knows that Nathan probably didnt intend for this to happen, not while Isaac's abilities are so pivotal to Nathan's position in the gang, he should have acknowledged that Nathan would always blame anything that was found out on him.

He was a total fucking idiot.

The next day the entire home is dragged out early in the morning and made to sit through an entire service at the local church, during which everybody else glares at him, aware that he is to blame.

Thankfully he isn't punished terribly harshly, only sent somewhere else.

Which is kind if nerve wracking, but at least he won't be here any longer.

The day before he's due to leave, Nathan corners him on the way home from school. "You know that I had to, right? You would have been punished anyway, but at least this way one of us stays - and I'm part of the gang."

As Isaac stares at him, Nathan slips a phone into his hand. "Look, I'm giving you this. We can keep in contact, secretly, you know?"

Isaac manages to nod dumbly and Nathan kisses him forcefully on the lips one last time before running off down the road.

 

Later he wonders whether Nathan ever realised that Isaac was the one to program all of their phones, and in turn what a stupid move it was to voluntarily give him one with which to enact his revenge.

 


	8. The Eighth (2010)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm going to post as much as I can today and tomorrow (unlikely I'm going to get to 25 by Christmas Day, but I can try, can't I? Especially if people cheer me on? Gotta love my unsubtle call for comments. But please tell me what you think!)

December the 8th, 2010

Age 21

 

Isaac rather likes his new flat.

Not that it's particularly new anymore, seeing as MI6 moved him in here back in July, a week before he started working for them in earnest. But it's still different to how he was living before (as a student on a scholarship and a small allowance.)

So it's a bigger living space than his last flat, and is therefore rather average by London standards - in fact the entire building is about as average as a place can be, plain and boring.

Isaac knows that they've done background checks on all of the inhabitants (and then he repeated them with greater depth) and at least half the people on his floor are people who work for the government.

Plus there's all of the security cameras and complicated locks, so its fairly safe.

Isaac may have installed a few things himself, just button cameras in various corridors.

So Adam Smith (the name which MI6 have given him to exist under, and which Eve Moneypenny laughed over, going almost into hysterics when he told her that he was gay) is just another government worker drone who is completely uninteresting in every aspect of his life.

 

Work itself is fairly interesting, with more complex things to do and a surprising amount of opportunity for creative design and new projects.

Major Boothroyd, or Q, is head of Isaac's division, Q Branch, and Quartermaster.

Isaac is fully aware that it is his position that they are training him to take over, eventually, which is kind of incredible, seeing as Boothroyd often personally oversees 00 missions (through an earpiece, safe in London), but it is amazing nonetheless, seeing this man direct some of the deadliest men and women on the planet.

The most interesting of which is James Bond.

He's supposed to be some kind of sociopath, not caring for much besides the job, booze, and sex, but he does see the affection and interest as Boothroyd shows him all the little gadgets and things that they've built recently.

Its almost like the man has a heart - and then as he saves another agent's life for no reason other than being unable to watch him die, even being ordered to leave him, even possible jeopardising the mission (Bond kills the target with ease anyway), he realises that he does.

Which is a weakness in some ways, but in others his passion is another weapon in his fight against the rest of the world.

And Isaac is so jealous for it and he knows that despite all his skills, even if he can become Q, he could never do what Bond does (but he can damn well try).

Isaac also knows that his crush on James Bond, 007, is quite frankly idiotic, not least due to their work, but because there is absolutely no chance of anything happening.

Bond never so much glances at him while visiting Q - he is busy, so it's understandable - and meaningless fucks have never been Isaac's cup of tea anyway, so he goes home lonely to an empty flat.

 

It's good, because here there's no bloody Christmas decorations in his flat, or even in the corridors of the building, thank god.

So from the moment he steps foot inside the building, he doesn't have to deal with Christmas at all.

He can just be, and do whatever the hell he likes.

Unfortunately, just as he has begun to settle into his bed, with a rerun of doctor who playing on one of his TVs, that he can hopefully fall asleep to, the doorbell rings.

He pauses the show (ah, Captain Jack, you delicious omnisexual timetraveller disguised as a WWII air force officer, you) and brings up the camera outside his door.

It turns out to be Margery, the wife of one of the civil servants who lives down the hall.

Isaac almost wishes that it were some enemy agent trying to trick him into letting him in, simply so that he can test some of his pet projects and let out some frustration.

He does wish that it were when he sees what Margery is holding.

It appears to be a plate of Christmas themed sweets.

The plate is decorated and shaped like a star, and all of the food that is piled high is coloured red or green or white or some combination of the three.

Ugh.

He can hear her calling through the door. "Adam? Are you there?"

All he has to do is stay silent.

Pretend that he's not there.

Pretend that he's asleep.

God, he hates this fucking month.

Curling into a ball, he tries to force himself out of his mind, at least until she has gone.

Until he can rest.

Just some rest.

 


	9. The Ninth (2006)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Refer back to Chapter 3 is needed, also set in 2006 (He blacked out everything in a 3km radius)  
> I'm writing, I'm writing.  
> This is going to run far over into the next week, I'm sorry.  
> I hope nobody minds.  
> :)  
> Song for this chapter is Xmas Curtain by My Morning Jacket.

December the 9th, 2006

Age 17

 

The week had gone from bad to worse.

It had begun with the Christmas light incident in which he had blacked out so many buildings by accident. He half expects to be picked up the next day and charged with terrorism, and waits for someone to come to the door, but there has been no one.

It is somewhat of a miracle.

But then just yesterday his friend Lloyd calls him up in a panic saying that he was at the police station, arrested for soliciting in a bathroom, and Isaac knows that he'd never do that, right, and he'd just needed to pee and this guy had been flirting a bit and it was weird but the guy was cute so he had been going to give him his number and been slapped in handcuffs instead and help!

And Lloyd has an anxiety disorder and sounds like he's about to have a panic attack if he isn't already, so Isaac tries to soothe him, and promises to make it go away, as long as Lloyd tells the police the truth and answers all of their questions as well as he can.

Then he hangs up the phone and sets to work.

It's child's play to access the computer network inside the station where Lloyd is being held, so much so that he has a little play with their systems to fix at least a couple of the easier loopholes while he's searching the records for the arrest, as well as the CCTV from around the bathroom and inside the police station.

But everything seems to go fine with him just nudging it along with well placed notes and the basic lack of evidence, and as soon as Lloyd is released and they officially drop charges, Isaac simply erases the entire file, because Lloyd will worry all about it otherwise.

And he covers his tracks with ease on the way out.

So he doesn't quite understand why it's now, in one of the meeting rooms if his high school, having just been pulled out of Physics that the authorities have caught up with him.

The man is obviously an agent of the law, with his arrogant and authoritative demeanour. He waits until the staff member who fetched him to leave the room before introducing himself. "My name is Davis, I'm an investigator for the cyber terrorism unit of British Intelligence."

Isaac feigns confusion. "What's this about?"

He fixes him with a look. "I believe you know all of the details of Mr Lloyd Nadir's encounter with the police yesterday."

"I had nothing to do with that. And anyway, he was innocent."

"Oh, we know. And you did a very good job of cleaning up your trail. We only knew you were in the system because we were looking for you."

Isaac is about to speak, but stops, because he has no idea what to say to this.

Davis continues. "Also, last week, there was a blackout centred around the building in which you live. It was fixed fairly quickly, and they were able to trace the computer from which the order came. Your laptop, on which I'm sure evidence will be found. Was there are purpose to this?"

Isaac shrugs.

And of course, over the years there's also been illegal access into records, some of it for you, I believe - an attempt to find your family, wasn't it? - but also for various others."

"How did you find out about me?"

"Nathan Carter."

Isaac can feel his face pale at the name.

"Your work with the phones of the Blackcairn gang had the police a few steps behind them for months, until you pulled that little trick."

He can't help but smile a little at the knowledge his plan had worked.

"They pointed their fingers at Nathan, who in turn blabbed about you in an attempt to get out of a long sentence. So we checked up on you, monitored your activity. Never would have got onto you otherwise."

He can't speak.

"So, we can either charge you with a long list of offences, or we can come to some kind of arrangement."

"You knew. The entire time."

"Pardon?"

"You kept an eye on me, but you never actually did anything?"

"We had to test your skills. That's why Mr Nadir was arrested."

"So - you put Lloyd, who has an anxiety disorder, under a great deal if stress, just to see if I would help him get out of a charge that never should have existed."

For the first time, Davis looks uncomfortable, so Isaac continues. "I will not talk to you. Not today, because I need to go and apologise to my friend for his being put through that. Please do not contact me until I had had time to stop being furious about your treatment of British Citizens."

He almost manages a dramatic exit, not stumbling once as he walks to the door.

"You turn eighteen in less than two weeks. What will you do?"

This makes him halt.

"We can pay for your continued education. You could study at the top university in Britain, and we could train you. If you decided to work in a different field, we would let you go, as long as you provided nothing to our- competitors."

Isaac hates them.

Hates this - hates himself.

This is a chance that he will never be offered again.

But this organisation has never actually contacted him, never helped him, not in all the time they have been watching him.

"I will contact you before I reach majority."

"My contact details-"

"Do you really think that I need them?"

Not waiting for an answer, he walks out of the room and back to class.

 

It is the evening of the twenty third when he opens up his laptop and begins to delve into the networks of the intelligence services.

Davis' computer is easy to find, so he shuts down all functions and leaves a single word flashing on the screen.

Cambridge.


	10. The Tenth (2001)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There are carols playing on loudspeaker near my house and even with all doors and windows shut and my own music playing I can hear them. Ugh.  
> I'm doing a carols chapter later, too.

December the 10th, 2001

Age 12

 

Isaac has never been allowed to help decorate the artificial Christmas tree.

That task has always been given to the older children, who can reach all parts if the tree, while he and the rest were relegated to make ornaments and paper chains.

Even now that he's older, he hasn't had a growth spurt yet, so apparently he's still too short to help with the tree.

Which is total bullshit, because no one else understands optimum arrangement of Christmas lights.

Instead he has to sort out the stupid little baubles.

Finally everything is arranged and the flick the lights on.

They glow softly, some behind branches and unseen and other light bulbs broken, so the spots that do have light are patchy, but no one else seems to mind particularly and so Isaac says nothing.

They coo over it all for a few minutes and then everyone goes back to their rooms, while Isaac sits down on the floor by the tree and gazes up at it, counting the lights and the minutes until he judges that it is safe to adjust things.

Fetching a stool from the other side of the room, he rearranges the string of lights so that each one is visible and make a good pattern across the front half of the tree.

He switches them back on to find that more than he thought of the light bulbs are defective.

At least they're not blacking out in sets like fairy lights sometimes tend to do.

Memorising the pattern of those not working, he switches them off and unplugs the entire thing.

He unscrew the first bulb and takes a close look to see whether he can reattach the fuse and make it work for a little longer.

He doesn't know how long he works, but he manages to fix six, and he's working on one on side of the tree, the very end of that particular line before it bends and continues upwards.

He's concentrating hard on joining the tiny pieces of metal together that he doesn't hear anything, doesn't see anything and suddenly the filaments spark at his finger.

His automatic reaction, unfortunately, is to drop the open bulb, and he's cursing himself even as it falls onto the plastic leaves.

And bursts into flame.

Someone is beside him almost immediately, whoever it was who reconnected the power without investigating why it was unplugged in the first place, but they have the fire extinguisher, so they're obviously much smarter than Isaac.

The fire is out and Isaac is just sitting there dumbly.

By the time he becomes aware of something other than Miss Rainer trying to coax him into standing up, all the other kids are crowding around the doorway wanting to know what has happened.

Mrs Garner pushes through them and takes one look at the scene. "To your room, Isaac!"

He complies without protest.


	11. The Eleventh (1996)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is only a short one.  
> Song for this chapter is Walking In The Air (The Maccabees' cover version.)  
> I just seriously love this version of it, not sure why.   
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5nKjGRONr4

December the 11th, 1996

Age 7

 

Snow.

Isaac loves it.

He likes the feel of it crunching beneath his feet, the way it brushes against his face.

He likes how it falls, whether slowly or wildly or too thick to see.

Most of all he loves to catch a flake in his hands, to examine the pattern, different each time.

To watch it melt against the warmth of his skin, as it naturally must do.

Things look strangely pretty when the snow first falls, pure and white and soft on trees and roofs and gardens, across the top of walls and over footpaths.

 

He also quite enjoys the snowball fights that the other children will have. Sometimes he joins in, but often he is content to just watch. The older kids say that he’s too small, too skinny, to join in anyway.

He supposes that he kind of is.

At least it means that he can just build things out of snow - a person, a little igloo, a star, an angel.

A host of wonderful, unreal creatures, to travel through the air and the night and his dreams. To take him away.

It’s a silly thought, so he sits back and watches as more snow covers it up.

 

But the snow doesn’t fall very often, and when it does it quickly goes grey and brown and slushy on the roads and footpaths.

And nothing is beautiful anymore.

 


	12. The Twelfth (2012)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Merry Christmas, you lot.  
> Song for this chapter is When The Thames Froze by Smith & Burrows.  
> Enjoy! :)

December the 12th, 2012

Age 23

 

Isaac doesn’t expect the Christmas decorations to go up quite so early. For the last two and a half years that he has been working in the Q branch of MI6, they had been too busy up until at least the 17th or 18th, and even then it had all been rather restrained.

But as Jenny, the loudest supporter of putting everything up, had said, it had been a long year, and they all needed a celebratory atmosphere to make up for it. (Though Isaac hadn’t quite expected this.)

It was true, though - things had been difficult recently.

Aside from the usual international catastrophes, Bond had died just last month - though for most it was simply a loss of a good agent and it was the hard drive that was upsetting - and then the threat of the information on the hard drive hanging over their heads had them all under a lot of strain.

Isaac himself has spent a majority of his time, at work and occasionally at home, trying to track possible information of the drive, of the data that was stored on it, wondering whether they would quietly reveal the undercover agents in enemy forces to those in charge. Surely they would, and sooner rather than later, before the agents were pulled out by their directing organisation.

In any case, he is so exhausted from working the last 36 hours in a row and then going home to not be able to sleep because James Bond should not have died, that when he sees the golden orbs hanging from the ceiling and wreaths on the side of every desk, he can’t be arsed to do anything but sit down in his chair and try to falls asleep.

He actually manages to fall into unconsciousness for an hour or so, but then he’s woken up because Boothroyd wants him in one of the R&D labs, so he pours himself a cup of tea and heads down.

There they spend a long while working on the prototype for a palm recognition activated gun to be used by the 00s, which is - was - Isaac’s pet project that is slowly coming into fruition. Currently, however, they’re having a little trouble having it recognise the hand when it shifts to a different position.

“You’re rather gloomy today, Adam.”

Isaac looks up for a moment, surprised that Boothroyd is talking about something other than the gadget, and shrugs.

Instead of putting the other man off the subject, his response causes him to put down his tools. “Is it about Christmas?”

“What?” He’s kind of surprised that he has noticed, given that he’s tried pretty hard not to let any of this bother him in the past, or at least show anyone that it does. He supposes that Boothroyd would have more of a clue than most, given his knowledge of Isaac’s past.

“I know that you don’t enjoy it, and you never join in, but you didn’t protest when the others wanted to put everything up earlier this year, so I thought that perhaps you didn’t mind it as much.”

Isaac shakes his head, “Everybody seemed to need it. I figured I can put up with it, I’m just tired today-”

“Liar.”

“But they do deserve to celebrate, what with all the stress we’ve been under lately.”

“And having all this out is stressful to you.” Boothroyd sees far too much.

“A little, sir. But I can deal with it.”

The older man fixes him with a look. “Adam, they don’t need all of that to be cheerful about Christmas. They can do all that at home, no need to have it here. Besides, we need you in top form to find where that damn hard drive has got to.”

Isaac manages a small grin at him.

“Now, I have a meeting with M, so you get this identification system working, alright?”

“Of course, sir.”

“Good.” With that, he hurries off, and Isaac is left with the gun.

 

He arrives back at the Q Branch offices to find that the amount of decorations around had greatly diminished. He asks Jenny why they’ve been taken down, and she replies, rather sadly, “Q said that he could hardly see for all of it, and that we should learn how to decorate more tastefully.”

The crafty bastard.

 

Boothroyd comes back from his meeting and Isaac corners him in the older man’s office.

But all the man says is “Maybe next year I should tell everyone that it’s too much of a distraction and not let them put it up at all.”

Isaac can’t stop himself from smiling at that.

“Thank you.”

 

Q tries to put the memory out of his mind.

Boothroyd is dead now. The man who took him in, taught him so much, one of the few people to take enough notice of things to do something to help him, is gone.


	13. The Thirteenth (2007)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> DOCTOR WHO and THE HOBBIT finally  
> Song for this chapter is I Hate Christmas Parties by Relient K
> 
> I have ignored the fact that in 2007 Hanukkah began on the 5th of December.

December the 13th, 2007

Age 18

 

Cambridge is… interesting.

He makes some friends, and he learns pretty quick to be able to fake a reasonable posh-middle-class accent to ease his way with snobbier students.

Luckily, his brains also help with that - either make them respect him or make them hate him, anyway.

But at least all the work is intellectually challenging and he can actually open up to people a little more than he has before and he enjoys their company.

 

However, when his first Christmas break at University comes around, Isaac has exactly two friends.

Well, he does have more, _really_ , but by the time their mid year exams begin to finish up, the only people he is talking to are Beth and Marnie.

This is mostly due to the fact that they dislike the Christmas celebration almost as much as he does.

In fact, thanks to the over enthusiasm of several dorm residents (who can’t have studied terribly much for their exams), Marnie and Beth’s room is the only space in the entire building that isn’t completely covered in decorations.

Apart from a couple of storage cupboards.

Isaac’s own roommate (the _dickhead_ ) has taken the liberty of decorating their room, which Isaac obviously has yet to thank him for.

 

The reasons for the lack of Christmas spirit in the girls’ room are two:

Firstly, Marnie is Jewish, and her family only ever celebrate Hanukkah (plus, she’s far too lazy to do any decorating anyway).

The second reason is that Beth is a wiccan, which doesn’t actually preclude her from Christmas celebration, which she would quite probably do if it weren’t for one thing - her parents being ultra-conservative Christians who apparently set up a spectacularly creepy and elaborate nativity scene in their front garden every year (Isaac understands why she would want to get out from that.) As a result, she refuses to recognize even the ‘commercialised, bastardized celebration of a Christian event stolen from a traditionally Pagan festival.’

As finals draw to a close, the three of them band together to spend a great deal of time together in the girls’ room, complaining about Christmas - and then Beth suggests that they celebrated Yule instead.

It seems like a nice idea, and it gives them something to do, and Beth is happy to allow Marnie to put up a Hanukkiyah when the time comes.

Unfortunately, while it is, as a whole, quite a good idea, the organisation of it is undoubtedly going to be sending Isaac back and forth from his room to theirs, possible several times a day, rather than over in the morning and retreating in the evening.

But he wants to do this anyway and plus, he has an idea for making Marnie her own Hanukkiyah so that she doesn’t have to buy one to put out - it could even have adjustable candle holders so that it will fit whichever sized candles that Beth already has from her rituals -

He steps out into the hall, and remembers that it’s completely decked out in baubles and streamers and wreaths and even fucking mistletoe. And there’s that crappy Christmas music pumping out of speakers.

Seeing as it’s the afternoon and some people are still doing their exams, there aren’t too many people around, so he can get through to his room without too much of a problem.

Well-

“MISTLETOE!” A bunch of green leaves and white berries drop down in front of him and bounce against his forehead. He tries to bat them away while glaring at the girls who are camped a little way down the hall, holding a length of fishing twine with which they are dangling the mistletoe.

“Look, just because you’ve hit me with a bit of plant doesn’t mean that I have to kiss somebody, alright?”

He tries to walk on, but a guy who’s heading the opposite way steps in front of him. “It does if you’re hot.”

He’s pretty good looking, but he still doesn’t want to touch anyone, let alone let this guy do what he’s trying to do now - place strong hands around his head, pull him close and kiss him firmly, plunge his tongue into Isaac’s protesting mouth and not let go until Isaac forces him off.

“Get the fuck off me!” He shouts and pushes past the guy, sprinting to his room and getting there just in time to throw up into the rubbish bin.

Shit

_shit_

_come on, Isaac, you don’t need to relive this shit right now_

_you can stop thinking about it_

_come on_

  
  


When he slips back inside Marnie and Beth’s room an hour later, Beth looks up at him and frowns.

“Why is your face red?”

He has a look at it in the mirror to find that parts of his forehead are streaked beneath the skin, and when he checks his hands, finds the same thing.

“Of course I’m allergic to bloody mistletoe.”

 


	14. The Fourteenth (2013)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hehehe :) my friend is hating me for the next few chapters, yay! (Love her so much, she's amazing)  
> I never intended to write so much present-Q, but it ended up being more interesting than past Q, so all there is of past Q is relevant things to hating christmas, I guess…  
> ANYWAY  
> enjoy! :)

December the 14th, 2013

Age 24

 

Q bloody well hates shopping.

So when Christmas is creeping closer by the minute and people realise that they haven’t bought people presents, the shops all become so absolutely fucking crowded that it’s impossible to move, and Q hates that most of all.

Having experienced this before, Q, obviously, bought his presents for the few people that he is getting something back in September. (It’s really only Eve. She’s the only one who is getting anything substantial. M and Tanner are just getting ties, and his Q Branchers are each getting identical boxes of chocolates.)

So in general, the hideous crowds at every single shop selling anything at all don’t really affect him much.

Except for when he runs out of food.

He can’t eat out during the Christmas season at all thanks to the awful decorations and themed food and even if the place in question doesn’t have decorations then there are some on the way there or on the way back or around the place in question and even _taxis_ have tinsel in them now-

So it’s definitely much easier to cook his own food when he’s at home, and not even he can put up with the crappy food which is provided by MI6 for days on end (and that’s really only for when people are working through the night and they desperately need protein and caffeine and sugar).

For security reasons he can’t simply order food and have it delivered to his flat.

Also for security reasons, he can’t simply order food and have it delivered to MI6, taking it home with him when he leaves.

Which leaves only one solution.

 

He waits for a few days, living off of his emergency instant noodles and drinking tea, leaving the implementation of his plan to a particularly busy day.

It’s just about when he’s about to give in and brave the crowds just so that he doesn’t have to eat something which is mostly preservative and flavor that the perfect opportunity arises.

004, who’s on a mission in Mongolia, is thrown into action when her target blows up a government building in Ulan Bator and disappears, and Q has to guide her out of the city which has been shut down completely and try and find the target at the same town. When he takes a breather, 004 speeding out of the city on a motorcycle, he’s just about to wave someone over when an alert beeps.

008 is making unscheduled contact, a surprise seeing as he’s been undercover for the last two months without a whisper of it being blown - and suddenly here he is, shouting into Q’s headphones to _get him the fuck out of this godforsaken country_ and now _he’s_ the one blowing things up in an attempt to escape and throwing molotov cocktails and there’s a hair raising moment where he’s almost shot and then his neck is almost broken falling from a building roof, but he makes it and Q speeds him through any electronic and mechanical obstacles. Everyone breathes a sigh of relief when he’s out of the country, but they’ll need to keep an eye on him just in case.

When he gives the list to a minion they look at him in confusion and ask, “Is this your shopping list?” incredulously.

He convinces them to go by saying that he’ll likely be here all night at the very least to keep an eye on the agents seeing as there are two of them on the move and on high priority missions and 003 is hopefully still in position in the organisation that 008 is currently running away from, and seriously, he needs to eat, do they think that he lives off of tea?

Everyone laughs when Q sees the look on their faces and says “Don’t answer that,” but the brief moment of levity is interrupted by Zach, who Q passed 004’s comms over to, saying that she’s in trouble, and Q sighs before connecting and bringing up all information available on his screen.

 

It’s a couple of hours before Q can drink a cup of tea safely, with 004 having interrogated her target, dropped him off with authorities and on her way to Krasnoyarsk, and 008 safe on a flight back to the UK.

He’s almost forgotten about the two that he sent to buy his groceries earlier, at least until they come through the door, two or three shopping bags in hand… and followed by 007 and Eve, also carrying things.

Eve smirks and drops the bags on the floor. “Getting your minions to do your chores now, Q?”

There’s a few chuckles around the room.

Q bristles. “Do you know how busy we were?”

“What, you couldn’t have got the shopping done _before_ you ran out of food?”

“Well, I’m sorry for not seeing the future and seeing that 004’s target would destroy half of Ulan Bator and simultaneously 008 would get busted and have to get out faster than humanly possible.”

Bond speaks for the first time. “Is he alright?”

Q nods briefly. “Just a little battered.” Finishing the cup of tea, he pours himself another. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to find out exactly how 008 was revealed. If someone could bring my things into my office without disturbing me, that would be lovely.”

He closes the door (rather contrarily to his suggestion to bring his groceries in, seeing as it’s possibly the loudest door ever) and slumps heavily into his chair.

After the last few hours of contact with people, unable to stop working for even a moment, or close his door in case there was something that needed to be seen or spoken of in the physical world.

Now he gets to breathe.

 

When he drinks down the last of his stone cold tea an hour later and gets up for a refill, he finds that the bags are placed just inside the door of his office, and no one will tell him who put them there.

 


	15. The Fifteenth (2013)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter did not go where I intended it.  
> I am so sorry.  
> So, so sorry.

December the 15th, 2013

Age 24

 

It begins with Christmas music.

Christmas music is something that Q absolutely loathes.

The same songs sung over and over again, just with different voices, a different arrangement perhaps. Played over and over again, to the point where he feels like cutting out all power again.

Luckily, if he avoids shops, as he is reasonably successfully doing, and doesn’t turn on the radio or TV, he can get out of listening to them.

Until some bright spark decides that they should totally listen to cheesy Christmas music in the office.

Yes.

Brilliant.

Q leaves with the excuse of a meeting with Moneypenny, which could take all day, but to contact him if anything goes wrong.

It’d better fucking not. Though at least that would give him an excuse to tell them to shut the music off.

 

Eve is happy to see him, even strangely so - he finds out why when she shows him plain nails and hands him four bottles of nail polish and an assortment of brushes.

He makes a show of reluctance, but he doesn’t mind doing this for her, and it’s kind of relaxing, however effeminate it’s supposed to be. It’s enough a routine that has been sorely lacking the past few weeks that he doesn’t protest too much before hopping up to sit cross legged on her desk, her hand draped across one knee.

It is kind of annoying that he’s painting in Christmas colours of red and green and gold, but he can put up with it.

“So, why did you feel the need to escape?” She asks as he paints a base in green across one hand.

“Christmas music. I can’t stand it.”

She accepts it without questioning the reasons, for which Q is thankful, and they chat casually about colleagues and men and the awful guys who _still_ persist in asking her out even when they know that if she chose, she could kill them with a couple of fingers.

They’re in the middle of an argument about whether she should let Q sort them out or not, with Q threatening to mess up the gold outlines of the red and green swirls when James Bond enters the room.

“Eve, where-” All three of them freeze, staring at each other - or more precisely, Q and Eve staring and the agent and Bond staring at the nail polish.

Eve is the first to speak. “Q helps me out with my nails because he’s really _much_ better at carefully handing _tools_ , James, so stop staring.” She turns to smirk at Q, while still directing her speech at the other man. “He’s just _so_ talented with his hands.”

There’s a short pause where Q feels his face going up in flames, because while she told precisely the truth, the way in which she said it- and to Bond!

But the man in question just laughs and says, “I’m sure he is.”

If anything it makes him go even more red. “They’re playing terrible music up in Q Branch anyway.”

Eve snorts. “Please, you just wanted to hang out with me.”

Bond sighs and interrupts. “But Eve, really, where’s M. I’m so bloody bored.”

She waves her free hand at him. “There’s nothing for you to do here. Go seduce some woman.”

“It’s ten in the morning.”

“Hasn’t stopped you before, has it?” When Bond doesn’t reply, she sighs. “Go seduce some man then.”

“Eve.”

Q stares pointedly at Eve’s index finger, which he’s painting, and tries not to laugh.

“Really, James, when did you become so boring? If you’re not going to leave, sit down and Q can do your nails too.”

Q looks up, about to protest, but he can’t make a sound because Bond is right next to him. “I don’t think so. I’m not sure if-” He looks closely at the nail polish- “Femme Fatale would suit my nails.”

Eve mutters, “Why not? They always have before,” under her breath and Bond pretends not to hear.

Q holds back a groan. It’s a little like Alpha Male posturing with an almost attraction and the knowledge that both of them can kill with their bare hands. “Well, if you have any ideas about how to get revenge on the guys that won’t leave Eve alone, could you let us know?’

Bond raises an eyebrow at him. “You’re the genius, Q. Surely you can find some way to get them.”

With that, he leaves.

 

It takes Q a little while (and the section of his brain that runs over the list of things to do when he’s bored) to have a fully workable, enjoyable idea.

The entry on his mental list is something that he has wanted to do for a long time.

Create doors like those one the Heart of Gold in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a book that he has always loved.

Eve hasn’t read it, seen the movie or listened to the radio series, so she doesn’t quite understand.

“And would it really be terribly annoying for a door to be happy about opening and closing for you?”

“If you were having a terrible day, and every door that you stepped through sighed happily or said ‘glad to be or service’ wouldn’t you find that awful?”

She shakes her head. “Not particularly. You only would because you’re pessimistic and annoyed and _you_. What if they played annoying music?”

“What, make them listen to a song?” Her face lights up at his suggestion. “No, no, no, I am not going to- no. _Not_ that song. _Anything_ but that song, Eve. It’s so old now, and it’s a stupid idea and people will just think it’s stupid and not even slightly funny, please don’t make me!”

“But it would be so great! What if we only played a tiny little bit at a time? Get the tune stuck in their head without them realising it, and then they’ll start singing it and they won’t understand how it got there!”

Q groans, but he sees how it could be done. And it could work so damn well…

He gets Eve to start making a list of the people who annoy her while he finds an instrumental track of the song and commands his laptop to begin splitting the entire song into two second bits.

There are speakers above most doors in case of emergencies, but it is possible to separate them so that he can play something different on each one. By the time he finishes the program that make it happen, Eve has emailed him the list of people (which seems like she’s expanded it to anyone who has annoyed her _ever_ ) and he can simply copy the names across to the program and hit send.

Anyone on that list who uses their ID to get through any door throughout the entire of MI6 will find themselves listening to a 2 second clip of the song. The next door that they pass through will play the subsequent clip, and so on.

The computer soon pings and a video feed pops up of some guy from accounting, who’s passing through the corridors on the way to his department. They watch as he stares at the door in confusion, shakes his head and goes through.

The laptop continues to notify them of people passing through doors, but it’s far too funny just watching the one man’s path, as he gets more and more annoyed and confused with the doors.

Chuckling, Q adds Anthony Daretz to the list.

When Q jokingly suggests that they get the computer to add subliminal messages of the lyrics to the target’s computer screens, he doesn’t expect Eve to take him seriously, but she does, and then badgers him about it until he begins to work on making it happen.

While he works, she laughs at everyone getting increasingly pissed off with the doors, occasionally showing Q a particularly hilarious reaction, and all this is kind of fun and he’s enjoying himself more than he has in weeks.

A burst of music announces someone’s arrival.

It’s Bond.

Q turns to glare at Eve, who can barely control her giggles, because she obviously added his name to the list. “You’re evil,” he tells her quietly.

“Did you have to do this to me as well?” Bond asks.

“It was Eve, she did the list.”

Bond glares at her as well for a moment before turning back to Q. “It is kind of annoying to have music playing every time you go through a door, but I don’t understand why everyone is getting so angry and complaining about it being stuck in their heads forever.”

“Don’t tell me you don’t know the song!”

Bond looks confused. “Well, no-”

Q stares at him, not sure whether he’s telling the truth or not.

“You’re so… old, James Bond.”

Bond actually looks offended now, and opens his mouth, but before he can make a sound the door bangs open, this time without the accompanying music.

“Q,” Tanner says. “Please tell me that you haven’t rickrolled the entire MI6.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alternative title for this chapter: The Great MI6 RickRoll.  
> Ugh, I am so fucking sorry.


	16. The Sixteenth (1997)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry?

December the 16th, 1997

Age 8

 

Other children's birthdays are celebrated.

They usually get a cake and a present and not exactly a party but dinner that day is usually nicer.

But Isaac - Isaac's birthday is too close to Christmas.

It's unfair to the other children, apparently, for him to have a birthday celebration when Christmas is for everyone and he kind of understands but mostly he doesn't and he thinks it's unfair but there's nothing he can do.

 

The only reason that Isaac gets up in the middle of the night is so that he can get a glass of water.

He doesn't expect Mrs Garner to be sitting there in the dim light.

There's a partly empty bottle of gin on the kitchen table, and an empty glass.

"Well, if it isn't the wonder child." Her words are slightly slurred but he can still understand what she's saying.

"Pardon me-"

"Pardon you, stupid miracle baby? That's what the nurses at the hospital called you. You shouldn't have survived outside our door for so long, you must have been there for hours before we found you in the morning."

Isaac is shocked. He's never been told how he was abandoned- he's not sure he wants to hear.

"It was Christmas Eve, and we had to take you to the hospital. And then it turned out that you were a blasted heroin baby, and there was no way someone was going to adopt one of those, so you ended up here anyway."

She glares at him, angry, and her hand is clenched on the glass.

Isaac runs.


	17. The Seventeenth (2005)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In case of confusion, refer back to Chapter 4 - At his job as a checkout guy in a store, Isaac meets a guy named Cameron, who gives Isaac his number.
> 
> Any feedback would be wonderful, if you could do so :)
> 
> (P.S. This time I really am sorry.)

Isaac waits a couple of days before calling Cameron.

To Isaac’s relief, he seems to remember Isaac and sounds fairly happy to hear from him.

However, it is rather disappointing when they try to organise to have coffee or a drink together and they find that neither of them are free at a convenient time to meet up for almost two weeks.

They decide on a queer friendly cafe at 9pm on the 17th.

 

December the 17th, 2005

Age 16

 

Isaac gets to the cafe early, worried. It’s the first proper date that he’s ever been on, really, not that he’s told - or will be telling - Cameron this.

If he shows up anyway.

He’s thinking of going back, chickening out, he can’t do this, it’s not even nine yet so he should worry so-

A hand slides around his waist and makes him jump forward, spinning round, but it’s Cameron.

“Sorry, didn’t mean to surprise you.”

Isaac flushes slightly because he’s being a little idiot and everything’s going to be fine. “It’s fine, my head was kind of in the clouds.”

They go inside and Isaac orders a cup of Earl Grey, which Cameron chuckles slightly at as he orders a coffee, and they sit down side by side in a booth.

He can’t help but feel slightly uncomfortable, so close to someone else, when he’s tried not be for a while, But it’s just a little date and he can totally do this.

Their drinks arrive and he thanks the waitress just as Cameron casually rests an arm over his shoulders.

He takes a sip of the scalding tea to try and cover up the tensing of his body, holds the cup to stop his hands from shaking, because _no, no_

Cameron’s saying something and Isaac doesn’t understand because his body’s screaming to go and his mind is shouting that he has to stay, he has to try, he _has_ to, so he just smiles woodenly and tries to stay in control.

It’s a bad idea though, because Cameron shifts closer on the seat and their thighs press against each other and it’s stupid but it’s just too much.

He manages to put the cup back down without spilling too much and slides away on the seat, trying not to look at the other man. “S-sorry,” he manages to stammer. “I- I shouldn’t- sorry,” and then he’s up, he’s walking out of the cafe and his heart his pounding. He’s cursing himself because he’s such a fucking idiotic coward when he hears his name being called.

“Isaac!” Cameron is walking after him. “Isaac, what’s up? You just walking out?”

“Sorry- I thought I-”

The older man catches up and suddenly Isaac really doesn’t like the look on his face, or the fact that each time Isaac backs up, Cameron slowly herds him towards the walls of the buildings on the footpath.

“You seriously called me just to be a tease?”

“No, I didn’t mean-” the buildings are past level with him now and he’s still going backwards which means that he’s in an alleyway, the very last place he needs to be, he needs to be away, as far away from human contact as possible.

He tries to move past Cameron and finds himself pressed up against a wall by a much stronger grip on his upper arms.

Lips descend and _no, he can’t have someone this close to him, not right up against him, not touching him, but he can’t move and everything is no_

“Knew you weren’t such a prude, now open up for me,” Cameron orders, his face still right in front of Isaac’s, grinning at him as he presses his body closer, harder against Isaac, erection rubbing against his thigh.

The grip on Isaac’s right arm is loosened and the left is let go completely, and his right hand dives into his pocket, because if he can just get to his phone, he can get away.

But the hand that was holding his left arm to the wall is slipping down his pants, inside his underwear. “Come on, it’s not like you don’t want this, right? You wouldn’t have called me otherwise.” Isaac scratches at Cameron’s face, tries to push him away, and thankfully he brings away from his cock and out into the air again, forcing Isaac even harder up against the wall this time.

The hands tighten again, but Isaac’s fingers still close around the phone and he can bring it out, arm bent at the elbow, and he smiles, suddenly in control. Holding the center button down, he readies it in his hand and swears that if he makes another of these devices then he is most definitely _not_ going to set up a stupid passcode for it. “Isn’t it _shocking_.”

He thrusts his hand out as far as he possibly can, and sighs in relief as the prongs that have been extended from the base of the phone, now buzzing with electricity, make contact with Cameron’s abdomen.

The effect is immediate, and Isaac is able to push him backwards, take a couple of steps away in preparation to run if Cameron recovers as soon as the current is removed.

It looks like he is, because while one hand is massaging the spot where Isaac jabbed him, he looks otherwise fine and his face is rather murderous. “You little bitch.”

Isaac scarpers.

Cameron’s faster though, and before he can get anywhere his shirt is pulled back by the neck and he is turned around, wrists pinned together and his phone knocked to the ground.

He’s terrified now, because for all his brain he can’t do anything against Cameron’s strength and this is all his own fucking fault anyway-

A hand on his shoulder jerks him back and suddenly there’s someone in between them. A man in the dark uniform of the Metropolitan Police, who pushes them far enough apart the Cameron is forced to let go and Isaac is free. He has to force himself not to bolt.

The officer is turning Cameron around, forcing his arms behind his back, when he says “Oh come on, it was just a game, wasn’t it, Isaac darling.”

The cop turns his head, looking at Isaac for confirmation, and Isaac realises that he’s trembling and rubbing his wrists and hunched into himself and their eyes meet. The man turns back around with a harsh chuckle and says, “Yeah right, fucker.”

Isaac can feel his body sag in relief and he’s absolutely not going to cry, not now.

He has just found his phone one the ground when he hears Cameron shout, “He fucking tasered me!”

“Well, it obviously didn’t do much, did it.” The officer hauls him away to the end of the alleyway, where he hands him over to what looks like another cop.

Isaac snaps off the prongs from his phone, and restarts it. There’s just enough power for what’s left of the prongs to be drawn back into the case and sealed over.

The cop comes back. “I’m Constable Richards, by the way. _Do_ you have a taser?”

Isaac winces. “I have a phone.” He holds it up and Richards takes it, examining it carefully.

“So you _don’t_ have a taser?”

“I- I’m good at making things. Adjusting things. I have never had a taser. Theoretically, I may have had something that was mostly one thing but called also be used as a non-projectile electroshock device.”

Richards grins and shakes his head slightly. “If you press charges he’ll probably report you of possession of a firearm - which tasers come under, and then you’d be investigated for that.”

“I don’t want to-” He has to stop and breathe. “I don’t want to press charges, I couldn’t- can’t handle- couldn’t go through it.”

“If we make him think that you’ve agreed to not press charges, he might agree to not report you.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. You’ll have to come down to the station to at least give some sort of statement to get things going, but everything should be fine. Besides, it doesn’t look like it - theoretically - worked, anyway.”

Isaac smiles slightly. “Theoretically, it would have allowed me to get away. Which is all it theoretically needs to do, right?”

 

He doesn’t know how they manage it, but they do. He suspects it’s probably getting close to 11pm when Richards comes back into the interview room where they’ve stuck him, grinning.

“He took it. Too scared for his reputation and his job, especially once he found out you were only sixteen.”

“Thank you.”

Richards continues to talk as he leads him out of the building. “I wish that you could have pressed charges though-”

“I couldn’t. I- I’m too scared of everything anyway.”

Richards looks pityingly at him as Isaac gets into a cab. “Take care.

“Thanks. I will.”

 

He tells the foster carers that he was mugged on the way home from the coffee shop and so had to spend a couple of hours at the police station, and they’re annoyed but don’t question him any more and it seems like everything’s going to be fine.

 

The next day, after work, his supervisor hands him his pay packet and tells him he’s fired, because they ‘don’t need [his] kind here.’

Wonderful.


	18. The Eighteenth (2013)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was going to finish writing 24, if not 25, tonight, but then I got lost in the Ben Whishaw tag…  
> (So I'll let you read while I have a breakdown over his face because HOW- I just- he- ahh)

December the 18th, 2013

Age 24

 

Q has a migraine and everything has turned to shit.

Well, not to anyone else, but in his mind everything is out of place, disorganised and all messed up.

And its not like anything really bad is going on, because all the agents in the field currently are currently on standby, on surveillance or in deep cover and there's not much they can do for any of them.

They're analysing video feeds and various organisations' electronic data, but it's all so boring and Q is going to go crazy if something doesn't happen and everybody doesn't fucking well shut up about Christmas, as he's so very tempted to tell them to.

(His internal monologue is swearing a lot these days, he realises. When he thinks and talks to himself he’s bloody well swearing for half the fucking sentences, and it’s graduating into his verbal communication, as much as he tries to stop.

Because he normally can stop himself from swearing when he’s not stressed or worried, can stop himself before he reverts to the speaking habits of childhood.)

The only good thing that has come of this holiday is that Eve has given him a giant teacup, and now he can drink more than half a litre of tea without having to get up and talk to anyone.

The down side is that she said 'Merry Christmas' when she gave it to him and now that's all he fucking hears.

"Merry Christmas," everyone says when someone from another department walks in or out.

"Merry Christmas," when a thumb drive is thrown across the room at someone else.

Yeah, well Merry fucking Christmas to every fucking person in the entire fucking world.

Everybody says it to him at some point and he gets angrier each time they do- well, Bond hasn't, but he supposed that maybe Bond didn't care for the holiday, at least until he heard him tell Jenny to have a merry Christmas, which is odd but he really doesn't want to think about that asshole right now-

"Q?"

"What?" He doesn't mean to snap at the minion who opens his door, but it's bloody well closed for a reason. They can send him an email.

"Um, 005 needs to talk to you about some equipment for the mission-"

"I'll be out in a fucking minute."

 

It's not terribly difficult to explain the devices that 005 is taking to the agent, as they're fairly simple and it's not like 005 is an idiot.

So that's fine, but just as 005 is leaving, Bond saunters in as he usually does, the asshole.

"Q-" he begins in his usual charming way before Q interrupts.

"Fuck _off_ , Bond. You don't get to walk in here in that bloody way of yours and say 'Q' in that stupid tone of voice. Not when I work pretty fucking hard on all these things for you. I'm not at your blasted beck and call, not when you take out equipment that isn't even for a fucking mission, smash it into fucking pieces somehow and then have the gall to return it with the fucking most important part missing. You do _not_ get to fucking talk to me. What you do get to do is turn the fuck around and walk that tight ass back out the door."

He doesn't wait for a reply and stomps back to his office.

Now he's really fucking pissed.

And his headache is worse.

He feels suddenly exhausted, limbs like lead and head heavy.

Maybe he can fall asleep for just a moment.

 


	19. Dreams: Part 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for the lovely comments, I love you all :)  
> Song: 2000 Miles, by The Pretenders

 

There’s something wrong with his mind.

He’s there and not there, aware of nothing in reality and everything of the rest.

Memories come in a flood.

* * *

 

M is there in his mind, the old M, _his_ M.

She wasn’t kind by any meaning of the word, not to anybody’s eyes, but she was good to him.

When he is in his third and final year at university, finishing the standard Engineering degree (specialising in Mechanical Engineering), he is called to London to meet her.

He’s nervous, terribly so, but when he walks into her office she stares at him for a moment, looks down at the file in front of her and back up. “Are you quite sure that you’re twenty one, and haven’t just fiddled with your birth year on records?”

“Er- fairly certain.”

She looks a little amused. “Well, sit down. I suppose there isn’t much we could do about it even if you had, so it doesn’t really matter.”

He sits, and tries not to stare at the porcelain bulldog on her desk.

“Your university marks are good - and you’re finishing a year early. All the work that we have asked you to do has been excellent.”

“Thank you. I- I tried.”

“You’ve done well, Isaac, without even considering your circumstances. We only hire the best, you must be aware.”

The way she looks at him, eyes piercing, makes him flush. “I have seen… some records that attest to that.”

“Let’s hope that you can bulk up our cyber defences then.”

Isaac attempts a smile. “I’ll do what I can.”

“Well, you’d better be bloody good, or I’d never live down hiring someone that looks like a teenager. I’ll see you again once you have finished university. I assume that you would still like to work for us once your formal education is completed.”

Isaac can only nod. He’s been worried that something was wrong, that he was being called to London to be informed that he was to leave the university, but now his fears are assuaged somewhat.

“That’s good. You may go.”

She nods at him as he stands up, and he’s possible a little shaky as he walks back towards the door.

“Oh, Isaac?”

When he turns she looks rather solemn. “I feel the need to apologise on behalf of MI6 for your treatment three years ago. I am not informed of minor recruitments until they have been finalised, and the way you were treated - it was wrong of them, and they were reprimanded. The work that we do may be underhanded and plain dirty at times, but we try to keep our on men loyal to us.”

It sounds harsh, but she has apologised. She is the head of the British Secret Intelligence Service, and she has apologised.

He loves her for that.

* * *

It’s white. White all around.

Which doesn’t make sense, because it hasn’t been snowing, and it’s not cold anyway.

A blurry figure appears - where’s his glasses? - and as if through a fog he hears a voice telling him to rest. He needs to rest.

His eyes close again.

* * *

 

The explosion at Headquarters destroys part of them all.

Personally, Isaac - Q - feels that Q Branch are the ones most affected.

Boothroyd is dead, too old and weak to survive his wounds.

There are obviously others who die, but none of them are Section Chiefs, and no other department is left like a headless snake.

Isaac - Q, he has to remember that now, that he is the one who leads these men and women - is doing all he can to keep things together and find out who the hell has done this. _How_ the hell they did this.

They’re evacuated down to the tunnels where the electricity is outdated and the internet is nonexistent but Q raises a fuss and they’re pretty good at getting things done in an emergency, so Q Branch is one of the first divisions to be properly set up (at least as well as they will be until the crisis is over) in under a day.

Then he sets every one of the brilliant minds under his command to finding the bloody hacker.

They take it in shifts to sleep and work around the clock, but Q works as much as possible because the few times that he rests his head he just wishes that James Bond was here. It’s illogical, because who knows how much he could do, but he just can’t help it.

Three days later they’re not even close and Q has M storming in and demanding to know how Bond got into her house with nobody noticing.

(At least he has an excuse for that - Bond had convinced Boothroyd to adjust M’s security system to let him in automatically a long time ago, and they’d never revoked it when he ‘died’. M’s pissed but can’t blame anyone but the agent, who never listens, and Boothroyd, who’s dead.)

He’s ordered to put together equipment for Bond, and one of the personalised Walthers is ready for programming, so he puts that in order with one of Medical’s scans, and sets about making a radio for him as he watches Bond being put through tests to make sure he’s fit to be sent out.

And he so very obviously isn’t.

It’s terrible to watch, this once powerful man failing the tests that he has performed so brilliantly in before.

His shooting is off, his muscles are atrophied from lack of his usual exercise (except, Q supposes, his usual exercise with women,) and his heartbeat rises at the slightest stimulation.

In short, Bond is an average human.

(If still built like a fucking god and handsome as sin, because Q still has a crush on him, even if he did pretend to be dead for three months.)

And he fails Psych miserably, but half the people here do anyway, because they’d have to be mad to work for MI6 anyway.

He watches as Bond cuts into his own shoulder, removes the bullet fragments still in there. Watches as blood pours down his chest, and sees how long it takes for Bond to stem the bleeding. _(Too long.)_

But he watches, and he hurts, feels pain for this man who has heard his boss, someone he trusted with his life, give the order which almost killed him. And he has come back for her, and for England, and now he might throw his life away.

And Q had thought of him so much, and dreamt of him, and he hates that he is sending him off to die, and that M is sending him off to die, but it is his job, and Bond’s job.

All he can do is try and watch his back.

 


	20. Dreams: Part 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wish I could have made all the chapters as long as this one…   
> I hope you enjoy it :)

Somehow he gets through his meeting with Bond.

He doesn’t know how, but he does, and Bond looks at him appraisingly, and despite his digs at Q’s age and abilities, which he feels that he must return, he feels like it didn’t go too badly.

In fact, Bond has been quicker to accept him in this position than others have.

Of course, once Bond gets to Shanghai, things go to shit fairly quickly, with Bond getting rid of his earpiece, getting into a fight in a gambling den and then disappearing on Eve completely.

Then out of the blue the radio is activated, and they rescue him and take the enemy agent hostage.

 

Later, after it all, he reads Eve’s report, and Bond has trusted him, trusted MI6 once more when faced with his own gun.

He is gratified to know it, and to know that despite his fucking the entire operation up and letting Silva into the system, he is still trusted to get things right.

It does take a while for him to believe it, though, for the time after M dies and there’s neither of the people who trusted him the most are there anymore. He gets on with Eve well already, but she can’t make decisions on what is going on, not yet anyway, though undoubtedly she’ll one day be running the entire the place. Tanner likes him well enough, but it’s his job to be loyal to MI6 and M, so if Mallory ever made a decision, then Tanner would have follow his decision or lose his job.

Mallory himself knows that Q was loyal to the previous M, but he also seems to acknowledge that if he ever fired Q, he would do much more damage outside of MI6 than inside, so he’s probably safe in that respect.

Most of the agents are doubtful of him until he saves their life (often multiple times) with guns and other weapons and plain old hacking.

He worries about Bond’s possible attitude to him, but when Bond comes back after his time off, which was officially given for physical recovery, (but Q knows has been spent finding a new flat and drinking himself to death,) he’s slightly more acerbic, but otherwise largely unchanged on the exterior.

He makes jokes and flirts and accepts the weapons Q provides, and loses contact on missions (with what is frightening regularity for Q, who doesn’t want him to disappear again, because he’s had enough of pining over someone who barely knows him and may be dead, thank you very much,) and comes back with his equipment destroyed or lost and Q yells at him or refuses to do him a favor and then the cycle begins again.

 

So Bond seems to respect him somewhat, and the last thing that Q wants to do is ruin that by letting him know how he feels, because he knows how Bond treats others that make their crush known. It’s not like he treats them badly, not the ones who work within MI6. What he does do is either turn them down without offence (which doesn’t really happen) or explain that he’s not someone who has relationships, or would even commit to someone even if his job isn’t what it is. They never seem to mind this fact, so it’s inevitable that at some point they always go off to a hotel and shag for hours, and then Bond leaves and whoever it is is left worse than ever, and usually joins the ‘I fucked James Bond but he doesn’t like me’ club. It’s amazing that none of them harbor hard feelings towards the man, but Q supposes that there’s such a large number of them that it doesn’t matter too much.

And James Bond never actively looks down on them, because that would be entirely hypocritical. And Q thinks that it isn’t that they’ve had sex with him that makes them lower slightly in his estimation, because Bond isn’t like that, and obviously sex as something that is always worth having, no matter how dangerous (it’s very clear from his missions). What Bond probably doesn’t understand is why these men and women like him in the first place. Why they would bother having any kind of romantic feelings, when Bond’s job is generally to fuck and kill.

He likes them well enough, enough to sleep with them and take good care of them while doing so, by the sounds of talk he’s heard, but Q does see Bond looking at them with slight puzzlement, like he’s thinking, ‘You’re smart enough to work here, why are you bothering to hope for anything more than sex with me?’.

And Q’s entire job is to be clever, which Bond trusts him to be, and here he is, the stupidest of the lot.

So Bond can never know.

He swears to himself that Bond will never know.

 

It’s a bloody hard promise to keep sometimes, especially when Bond, while on a mission, gets himself into shit that he doesn’t need to, over a bloody _woman_ of course.

It comes down to the two men wrestling, and Q can’t get visuals, so all he knows of the fight is Bond’s grunts through the comms and the stats that his experimental chip, lodged in Bond’s scalp, is transmitting.

He’s trying not to distract Bond too much, but suddenly there’s silence, so he says “Bond?” and there’s no snarky retort, not even breathing. He can hear distant shouting, so he presumes that the device has simply dropped to the ground, until he looks over at the heart rate monitor and there is _nothing_.

“Bond? Come in, Bond, you stupid bastard.” There’s nothing and _no, he can’t do this_ , “James, if you don’t fucking answer me  _right_ now, I’m going to fucking kill you-”

There’s a cheer easily audible through the microphone and Q’s heart sinks.

“Q, sorry about that-” He jumps at the sound of the agent’s voice and his own heart starts back up again.

“Where the fuck is your heart beat, James Bond?”

“The chip must have fallen off, he had me in a bloody headlock.”

“Yes, and I thought that you were dead.”

Bond laughs shortly, but it’s a relief to hear, along with his breaths. “It’s not the first time, though.”

“Don’t you-” He’s interrupted by the heartbeat beginning up on the monitor again, and everything looks to be normal. He flicks the sound on, and lets the program’s imitation of Bond’s heart thud for a few moments.

“Everything looks fine.”

“Of course it does. Don’t be freaked out when it stops again, I’m moving it to somewhere less visible-”

“Where’d you put it?”

“I figured you’d get the best readings from my chest.”

“It doesn’t matter where the bloody things is put as long as I can get the data. Maybe we should implant a chip in you.”

“We tried that once, remember?”

“I could make it undetectable and completely secret. Just in case you ever disappear again.”

“You don’t have to worry, Q. I’m coming home.”

And he does.

 

* * *

 

 

It’s still white all around when he can see again, and a man, broad chest, black and white torso, tan face…

He slips under.

 

* * *

 

 

Another day, another mission: only Bond’s been chasing a trail half way around the globe to end up at a fancy party back in London (of course), and he’s lost his earpiece in a rooftop chase on the way there, because he’s a fucking idiot, and just walked into the casino anyway.

Q’s just glad that he’s in a city completely covered with CCTV and has had eyes on him all the way.

Unfortunately, Bond’s carelessness with communication devices means that when some rather pertinent information on the target comes up, there is nothing they can do but send someone else in to let him know of the change of plan.

Which means that Eve needs to get frocked up.

 

Q waits in a nondescript sedan a few streets away, cursing his fortune.

Eve isn’t in the field that much, not anymore, but she’s a good match for this job, so she gets pulled in. And given her recent desk work, she needs at least one person as back up, and in this case it can’t be Bond.

There’s security in there anyway, ones that they can count on to get her out if need be, but they still need someone who has had at least a little training in field work and satisfies the conditions for the mission. And Q happens to fill both criteria far too well, but at least if he goes in there he might be able to plant some bugs on someone.

He still hates it, though, and he can’t wait for the evening to be over so that he can forget about beautiful Czech criminal masterminds and get in some quality relaxation time.

He watches on the laptop screen perched on his knees as Eve sidles up to Bond and presses her body up against his, running her hands down his chest. He knows that one of them is sliding inside Bond’s jacket and placing the note inside, and that it needs to look convincing, but really.

“Simulating sex in the middle of the room was hardly necessary, Eve,” he snaps at her through the comms as she walks away.

“I touched him only as I needed to, as you are well aware, Q, darling. Or is someone a little jealous?”

“Jealous?” Q attempts to scoff at her suggestion. “There is absolutely no reason why I would be jealous about anything, let alone over that stupid bloody agent, who-”

“Shit, Q, I was joking- oh god, you’re head over heels, aren’t you.” He can see her sigh from the security camera feed.

“I am _not_ head over- I don’t even like him, alright?”

“Oh come on, you’ve got a crush the size of Russia on him, don’t you. How did I not see this before, you’re always soft on him, it’s obvious!”

“I don’t- just shut up, Eve, alright, and concentrate. You’re on a bloody mission now that we know that Bond is so very _not_ Renáta Macek’s type.”

“Yeah, I know - I still can’t believe that there was _no one_ else who could have done this.”

Q views her progress across the room via the security camera feed that he has hacked into, and runs a facial identification program to find Macek.

She turns out to be sitting at the far end of the long bar that Eve is just about to stop at, and her eyes seem to be following as Eve moves, at Q’s instruction, in the opposite direction.

“Do you have eyes on her?”

“I’m not blind. She’s looking right at me, too. Stop muttering in my ear so much, it’s off putting.”

There’s a few long minutes of silence.

Renáta Macek stands up and begins to walk around the bar, never taking her eyes off of Eve.

“She’s coming-”

“I know.”

The woman slides onto the barstool next to Eve. “That was a very nice trick back there.”

The microphone picks up Macek’s voice clearly, and he can only just hear Eve’s slight intake of breath, before his friend lets out a quiet chuckle, and brings her hand into Macek’s view. “Slip a number inside their jacket and they never see you taking cash.”

Macek’s laugh, Q has to admit, is infectious, clear and purely honest, and the way that she tosses her head back and artfully shakes her hair is guaranteed to draw attention from anyone interested in women.

So not him, but now she and Eve have the attention of more than half the people in earshot.

“Renáta.”

“Eve.”

The women shake hands and Renáta leans one elbow against the bar. “So, you mostly pickpocket, or…”

“Sometimes I do other work, but parties are the easiest.”

“Honeytrap?”

“Occasionally.”

Another laugh. “I find myself liking your- frankness. You enjoy the risk, a little, do you not?” Q can see her lean in closer and the next words are much louder. “Telling a mark that sort of thing is generally ill advised, so someone has either done some _excellent_ research or you have good instincts.”

_SHIT._

“If I had not been informed upon your entry of your identity, Miss Moneypenny, I certainly would have taken you to bed, no matter my suspicions, although I suspect that you lean more towards heterosexuality and would have got out somehow, possibly with the help of your friend Mr Bond.”

Q switches from headset to earpiece as Macek speaks, closes his laptop and instructs the driver to stay exactly where he is unless Q or Eve contacts him, and jumps out of the car.

Halfway to the doors of the casino Q realises that his tie is still loosened from when he had been getting himself settled in the back of the car, so he has to fix that and his shirt buttons that are undone and miraculously he _is_ let inside.

Eve is still with Macek, and the other woman is talking again. “I’m not sure what it is that you want with me, though - I’m only here to put the squeeze on one of my houses. The director has been misbehaving, you see, and I need to punish him.”

The bar is across the other side of the room, so for once Q is glad that he’s rather skinny, because it makes it that much easier to move through the crowd.

“Information,” Eve says. “Apparently you have information on a Clement Novak.”

“I do, but I can’t give it for free, and I would prefer to sleep with someone who desired me, yes?”

He spots Eve, sees her frown, consider- “Evie!”

Both of them turn to see who is calling, and both have entirely different reactions. Eve frowns and is even looking a little angry, while Macek beams at him and stands up.

Q pushes through the last of the crowd and stops in front of them, only for Macek to take hold of his cheeks and kiss him soundly on the lips.

He stares as she giggles at his blush. “Oh my, he’s adorable. Absolutely gorgeous.”

“Adam-”

“I’m just here to get Evie.”

Macek pouts and slide her hands into Q’s hair. “But you’re so cute! You’re absolutely wasted as a handler.” One hand runs down Q’s arm to his wrist and pulls him forward, closer to her as she sits back down on the stool. “Now that I’ve seen you, I so terribly want to steal you you- can I?” She directs this question to Eve.

“Out of the question.”

“Why, is he yours?”

Eve snorts. “Hardly. Not his type.”

Q is frowning at the two of them, even as Macek continues to ruffle his hair. “I’m right here.”

They both ignore him. “Ah, he wouldn’t go for either of us, would he?” At Eve’s nod she groans. “Damn. I’ll keep him for now, though, if he doesn’t mind my hands. You wanted to know about Clement, right?”

Eve directs a questioning gaze at Q, and he sighs but lets Macek move him closer so that she can run her hands over his head and shoulders with ease while the two women discuss the man.

Some time later, he feels a gaze settle upon him and looks up to find Bond’s eye boring into him from barely ten metres away. He looks away and tries to catch Eve’s attention with his eyes, but then he hears an “Ahem,” from nearby, and the women look up to see Bond right beside them as Q cringes.

“If you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to steal these two away from you,” he says to Macek, who sighs.

“I suppose I must.” She removes her hands from Q, only turn him to face her so that she can land a smacking kiss on one cheek. “It’s been a pleasure, darling.” She pushes him gently towards Bond and turns to Eve. “You, as well. I suspect you’ll be checking up on everything that I’ve told you, so if you would like something else, I’ll be staying at the Savoy for the next few weeks, and here is my card. Also, please don’t hesitate if you change your mind. Either of you.” She sends each of them a smile before sweeping off.

Bond is the first to speak, just as the three of them reach the casino entrance. “What the hell do you think you were doing?”

Q doesn’t know who the question is directed at, so he keeps quiet.

“Getting information, obviously,” Eve retorts.

“Yes, but why the hell is Q here? He doesn’t have field training-”

“I do have a little, just in case, and I’m not entirely defenceless-”

“Didn’t you get my note? And he was only supposed to be backup.”

“Yes, women and pretty men, I understand, but wasn’t there anyone else?”

“Can we discuss this back in the car? I want to go over her information somewhere that is private and where I can put on headphones and not listen to you two arguing whether or not I am capable of spending half an hour in the field.”

Both of them shut up.

 

Back in the car they’re still not talking, mostly because Eve has handed Bond the file on Renáta Macek, open to the pages on personal tastes and associates.

Q listens in (despite his headset) as eventually Bond chuckles and admits that most of the agents not out of the country definitely do not fit the description listed for most of the individuals in the file.

(“Ethereal, Bond, _ethereal_. None of you 00s could ever hope to fit that description. They’re delicate and absolutely beautiful, and maybe 002 could pull that bit off, she’s in the East and Q was absolutely perfect.”

“I wouldn’t say Q was ethereal-”

“That’s only because you’ve seen him at work. But he could pull it off, easily, he just has the right quality.”)

 

As it turns out, Macek’s information is entirely correct, and her own statement of her activities was also true, so while they keep watch on her, she leaves Britain just under a month later within the good graces of MI6.

 

* * *

 

He wakes properly, finally, in Medical, finding that Zach is sitting in the chair beside him once his glasses have been passed over. “What happened?” He feels remarkably well rested, which is rather strange.

“You fell asleep just after verbally tearing Bond a new one, and Medical figured out that you haven’t been sleeping, so they put you under. You’ve been out for-” He checks his watch. “More than thirty hours. You were supposed to wake up yesterday, but you didn’t, and your vital signs were okay, so they let you sleep.”

Q groans. “So what, it’s the 20th? Has anything happened?”

Zach shook his head. “Maddie’s keeping an eye on everything right now, we’ve been doing it in shifts, and someone’s been up here with you most of the time. If something had happened we’d have woken you up, don’t worry.”

“You do realise that I’m not going to be able to sleep for ages, now, right?”

Zach grimaced. “If you’d been sleeping even the littlest bit the last few days this wouldn’t have happened. And seriously, you look kind of… awful. Like you did back with the whole HQ being blown up thing. Is there something we can do-”

“No, I’m fine, you can forget about it alright?” Q swings his legs over the side of his bed, only for his eyes to catch on something sitting on the bedside table. “What’s that doing here?”

Zach follows his gaze to the object, and picks it up, handing it to Q. Sure enough, it’s the tiny bundle of sensors and recording equipment from the gun that Bond had destroyed. “Oh, that’s why Bond was in Q Branch that day anyway. He wanted to return it, but you were pissed, so he came by and left it yesterday.”

Q kind of feels like falling back onto the bed and trying to beat himself into unconsciousness again.

 


	21. The Twenty-First (2009)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am genuinely mad at myself for this, but seeing as I've written it, I'll share it with you lot <3
> 
> This chapter's song (this time it's actually related to the chapter, and it's gorgeous and makes me want to cry, even if this is only one interpretation of it. I wish I could properly do it justice): She Came Home For Christmas by Mew

December the 21st, 2009

Age 20

 

Isaac is excited and nervous to celebrate Christmas, perhaps for the first time in his life.

This year will be good.

He's spending it with Luke.

His boyfriend.

 

It's still weird and lovely to say that, think that.

And he's still astonished that anything happened with him in the first place.

He'd only met him by chance, at a party back in February that Beth had dragged him along to so that she knew someone other than her girlfriend.

Luke had struck up conversation with him, and he hadn't been handsy or rude, only interested in what Isaac had to say.

They'd got on well, and Luke rather good looking, tall with rather auburn hair, so Isaac was pleased and surprised when Beth, having fought with her now ex-girlfriend, tries to drag him off, and Luke holds him back long enough to pass him his number and squeeze his hand briefly.

Marnie and Beth are both in the stage of trying to ignore the other's relationships at this time, so they have enough free time to bug him until he's convinced that he might as well give it a shot, so he agrees to have lunch with him.

And luckily, Luke is fine to just chat and rest his hand on the table by Isaac's and doesn't make any sort of move on him.

As they grow closer, Isaac has had to tell Luke things about himself - the surface only, like that he's not fond of being touched all that much (but Luke's caresses are of a comfortable nature, and he doesn't mind leaning into his embrace, and somehow all this intimacy isn't so bad, after all.)

And he explains as little about the Cameron incident as he can for Luke to get the gist, and Luke is so angry for him, and wants to know the name of the guy that did it so that he can kill him. And he asks Isaac how he got over anything of that kind, and all Isaac can say, is 'I was half crazy already, so I went with it and dealt' because he doesn't know how else to explain it because no one has ever asked, and is there another way to talk about his mental breakdowns anyway? So he stays mostly silent as Luke holds him gently and promises not to do anything that Isaac doesn't want him to.

But then in the end the sex is actually seriously seriously good and he's annoyed that he was nervous about it in the first place.

So it's odd, how much things have changed for him since he met Luke, but it's good, and he spends a lot of time at Luke's flat rather than the one he shares with the girls, (which is good because they're back to the lovey dovey stage of first going out for like the fifth time, he swears.)

And Luke ends up knowing more about him than anyone else, really.

Obviously, there are a lot of things that Luke doesn't know about his life, like that all the times he's had to put off a date because of 'an assignment he'd forgotten about' was actually because MI6 needed him to do something for him. And a lot of his childhood he never tells him, but the rest, the relevant things - Luke knows all that, and Isaac thinks that he knows a reasonable amount about Luke, about his family: his parents and an older brother, about how he finds accountancy embarrassingly interesting but he's just a glorified errand boy at work, and his wants and desires and his secret hope to start a family.

And Isaac really likes their relationship, and he wants it to stay like this but it will have to change at some point but please, god, not now.

And then Luke asks him to have an early Christmas dinner with his family.

 

Isaac is freaking out. He has never met Luke's family before, never met anyone important's family and he has no idea what the hell he is supposed to do.

And it's fucking _Christmas_.

When he voices his concerns to Luke, his boyfriend simply chuckles and pats him on the shoulder and tells him not to worry, it'll all be fine, and then pulls him back into bed.

 

Somehow Luke does convince him that Isaac doesn't need to bring anything, its just dinner, but he buys a nice box of chocolates anyway (after ascertaining that no one has any allergies) and there is no way that Luke can stop him from wearing the nicest shirt he owns, and even doesn't wear one of the cardigans that he loves but Luke hates in case Luke has inherited his taste in clothes from his parents or something, he doesn't actually know.

 

Isaac is practically begging Luke to let him let him leave and catch a cab back when the door opens and a middle-aged woman is standing there beaming. "Luke!" She steps out and hugs him tightly.

Luke grins as they break apart. "Mum, this is Isaac."

She turns to him, still smiling. "Any friend of Luke's is welcome here, and his boyfriend especially so." She ushers them both inside, and Isaac finds himself smiling at Luke, because this might be easier than he thought.

And it is. Luke's dad is welcoming as well, and he's laughing with them by the time they sit down to dinner.

There's a knock on the door and then the sound of it opening, and Luke's mum says, "Oh, that'll be Cam!" and leaps up to greet him.

Luke whispers, "My brother," and Isaac nods, because he'd forgotten that he was going to be there too.

Then he hears "I'm here, everyone!" and feels his body freeze up because he _recognises_ that voice.

And he realises that he has never asked Luke what his brother's full name is. And he feels that there are eyes on him, eyes he knows, eyes that he never wants to see.

"Cam, Luke's already here, and this is his boyfriend,-"

"Isaac?"

He looks up, and Cameron is standing there, older, but undoubtedly the same man from when he was sixteen.

"You know each other?" His words break their eye contact, and Isaac looks back at him. Luke looks taken aback. "Isaac, what's wrong?"

"I-" he glances quickly at Cameron, who still looks shocked and maybe slightly angry. "I should go."

He gets up from the table as swiftly as he can, and slipping around the edge of the room to stay as far away from him as possible.

He's closed the door behind him and is pulling out his phone to call a taxi when he hears Luke call after him.

"What was that about? How do you know him?"

"I was sixteen, Luke."

"So?"

He doesn't understand, and Isaac is trying to keep tears at bay. "I was sixteen and it was Christmas and I was working in a shop, and he came in and was nice and flirted and he gave me his number - is this starting to sound familiar?"

Luke is shaking his head. "No, you're lying. He- He's not that guy."

"Call me when you think I'm telling the truth."

He runs, and doesn't turn to see if Luke is following.

 

Isaac bursts into the flat, making Marnie and Beth jump up from where they’re cuddled up on the sofa.

He didn’t mean to let them see him like this, not in this state, but they know that he wasn’t intending to be back tonight, and now that they’ve seen his face-

“I’m going to bloody kill him,” Beth says before Isaac can say anything at all.

He feels a little stupid explaining, as he always does, because maybe he’s making such a deal of it all for not much.

But by the time he finishes, Marnie, who is possibly the least aggressive person that Isaac has ever met, and the least likely to threaten any kind of harm, is wondering out loud what they could do to him. And both are outraged at Luke.

 

The two of them are in the kitchen making tea when Isaac’s phone rings.

“Hello?”

“You’re a liar, Isaac. A fucking little shit.”

So Luke doesn’t believe him. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t- all of your things, from my flat- I want them gone by the end of the week. I’ll be away from the day after next to the 26th. Leave your key.”

“Okay.” He hangs up the phone, a numb feeling spreading through him.

Another end.

 


	22. The Twenty-Second (2013)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Personally I like to think that Q listens to Volcano Choir, because I love their album Repave in particular.

December the 22nd, 2013

Age 24

 

He can hear them on the street outside, and it makes him regret moving to a nicer flat after Silva’s breach in security had forced all of the departmental heads to move house.

At his old place there had never been carol singers.

It’s probably because to have carol singers at his other flat, they would have needed to stand out in the corridor and sing, which probably would have been awkward, but now that he’s in a townhouse, they only need to walk down the street.  

The sound of their singing drifts into the house despite all doors and windows being closed.

Their voices aren’t actually too bad, but the the music - god, he hates those words, the joy in all of it-

They’re in a public space, can’t they understand that people might be of a religion opposed to celebrating Christmas, or maybe just fucking hate it all like he does?

Q is actually kind of tempted to pull an Addams Family and pour something all over them so that they piss off, but it would probably be hard to explain away and get out of that one.

As it is, all he can do is retreat to his bedroom and put on his noise cancelling headphones - which work rather marvellously, perhaps even too well, because no noise at all is sometimes almost as bad, an abrupt silence, leaving only his thoughts, his mind turning over and over.

So he switches on some music that can drown it out, drown it _all_ out, and while his mind races and head spins, his thoughts are only turning in circles.

Beats move through him as he breathes, and he can relax and he’s alive and not, both at once.

His self stutters, and stops, restarts again with a jolt, an odd remaking of mind and soul in a few notes. He knows that when he comes to in the morning, everything will have snapped straight back to usual, but for now it’s almost cathartic to lie here and be, surrounded by everything.

And in the very middle of it all there is a blissful nothing.


	23. The Twenty-Third (2003/2011)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tash wanted to know about this, so here. :)

December the 23rd, 2003

Age 14

 

Whenever Isaac has spare time and access to the internet, he searches.

No one knows that he's doing so, not Nathan, who is providing the opportunity for internet, or anyone else at the foster home. He'd told Carr what he was starting before she left, and she had been kind of glad for him but worried, too.

But he hasn't been able to find anything.

Then again, maybe he had just been looking in the wrong places.

He stares at the screen, at the police database just sitting there, open.

He has searched for himself in there, as a last ditch attempt, but to his surprise, found something.

There's a record of his being found on the doorstep of his current home - abandoned there. His hospital records, the check up they did, the heroin found in his system. It's all here.

And a blood sample taken.

His DNA had been entered into the national database when it started up.

And three years ago there had been a hit.

Blood on some broken glass and smeared on the floor of convenience store that had been robbed.

The perpetrator, female, and a close enough DNA match that it was extremely unlikely that she was not Isaac's biological mother, was not found.

Six months later on the record there's another hit, tagged to the first. She is found dead in a known squat with a lethal dose of heroin in her veins and a bullet in her skull.

There's a note with that case too, about _him_ , saying that caregivers have been notified.

And they never fucking told him.

No matter if she wasn't a mother to him, if she abandoned him to this place.

She carried him in her womb for eight and a half months, gave birth to him, and at least she gave him to somewhere that would take care of him.

And they didn't think that he needed to know.

* * *

 

December the 23rd, 2011

Age 22

 

The date is a ghastly coincidence that he doesn’t realise until later, when he’s thinking more about his birth mother.

 

Isaac is simply working at the computer, trying to crack one of the CIA’s most recent codes when the alert pops up.

He’d almost forgotten that he’d put an undetectable flag on his DNA sample, to let him know if anything came up concerning him.

It’s a match for a relative. A father. Carl Reier.

He stops what he’s doing and follows it. It’s a DNA submission from a police station in London, of a suspect for one of their cases. Pandering, drug possession and trafficking, homicide - he has been suspected of it all, without any actual evidence with which to charge him.

He has finally been brought in on a drug possession charge and for having an illegal firearm.

After a second’s thought, Isaac electronically brings his mother’s file to the detectives’ attention, and waits to see what they will do with it. They seem to catch him up fairly easily with his denial of ever knowing his mother.

Reier seems surprised to find out that he has a child, and angry, possibly because eventually, this quite clearly connects him to a prostitution ring.

He confesses to knowing her, and provides a name - Angeline Martin.

The police do surprisingly good work, and he ends up being charged with various counts of assault, trafficking and homicide, as are some of his associates, one of whom is for the murder of Angeline Martin, and Isaac allows himself a little satisfaction for it.

Nothing can change the past, but now that his bastard of a father is jail, possibly due to his informing the police of the connection, then perhaps he can be a little pleased with himself.

 


	24. The Twenty-Fourth (1988)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song for this chapter: What Child is This?

December the 24th, 1988

 

It’s 4am and Samara Leith can’t sleep.

She’s tired of the foster home, so very tired.

She’s lived here for years, since she was a child herself, and now she’s eighteen and still there, because she’s actually okay at looking after the kids, and Mrs Garner needs help around the house, so she stays on.

She’s going to get a proper job sometime soon, when somebody will look past her birth and upbringing.

But for now, she has to calm fighting children and the occasional squalling infant and talk sense into awful teenagers.

She’s getting a drink from the kitchen when she hears it, a faint cry.

It doesn’t sound like it’s from further back in the house, or upstairs, which means it can only have come from outside- She hears it again.

When she opens the door she expects one of the local cats, or something similar - not a box and baby.

It’s tiny and pale and when it opens its mouth the cry that comes out is pitiful.

She picks up the box and brings it inside, where it’s slightly warmer, and when she places the box on the kitchen table and presses a hand to the infant’s cheek, she finds that it is terrifyingly cold.

Picking up the child, she cradles them against her chest, trying to at least give them a little more warmth while she notifies Mrs Garner.

The older woman answers Samara’s knocking on her bedroom door eventually, looking at the bundle in her arms and cursing. “Don’t they know that you can’t just leave children here? Call the police.”

Waiting for the police to arrive, she rocks the child, trying to stop its crying.

Being so young, it has so much more of a chance of being adopted, and she can only hope that they are. It would be such a pity for yet another child to be shoved back into the foster system and pushed around for the next eighteen years.

 

When the child is brought back in an official capacity, having had heroin found in his bloodstream, undoubtedly from his mother, Samara is in charge of care of him again.

Little Isaac Samuels, with his wide eyes and silence, whom she grows to love. He’s shy towards the other children, and Mrs Garner doesn’t like him because he’s made the busy home even busier, but puts up with it because he means extra money coming in, but she leaves him entirely to Samara, who thinks that it is at least partly to do with the fact that she hates heroin, and Isaac is an extension of that.

So he’s like Samara’s own child after a year or two, but then she gets a proper job, one that will pay for the things she needs and a flat -  nowhere near enough to care for a child.

She’s not even old enough to legally adopt, even if she is perfectly capable of doing so, and she’s not married, never has been, and it isn’t as if she couldn’t have children herself, presumably.

Samara knows enough about the foster and adoption systems to acknowledge that there is no way she would be able to adopt Isaac.

So all she can do is hope that things will be alright for him, that he’ll get out soon.

When she says her goodbyes to everyone, her eyes keep on catching on Isaac’s, who simply stares. And even though he can’t properly understand what is going on, and he won’t remember this or her anyway, his huge eyes just look so clear and reproachful that she can’t walk out the door without crying.

 


	25. The Twenty-Fifth (2013)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally, it's done!  
> I couldn't have written it without AA encouraging me, or venting to uninterested people about it, or your guys' sweet comments :)  
> And I'm sorry that it wasn't better written and that I didn't get it finished by Christmas, but I feel like I did pretty well with the deadline anyway.  
> I'm finishing off a New Year's Eve thing for this, I'll either post it as a 26th chapter or as a new fic, dependent on length.  
> (Song for this chapter is Christmas In The Room by Sufjan Stevens, it's really gorgeous and perfect for the feel of this chapter kind of)

December the 25th, 2013

Age 25

 

Q wakes early on the morning of the twenty fifth.

(He tries not to think of all the children who are now also waking, excited for their presents, for the celebration of the day.)

He would have taken the night shift as well, but after the last week, everyone is insisting that he rests as much as possible (with the exception of Bond, who just comes in with more and more bizarre requests), and also most of the staff would simply rather to take the shifts around Christmas Day so that they can visit their family or spend the day with someone special.

He has arrived at MI6 by 7am.

Unfortunately there's nothing really going on, as if everyone is celebrating Christmas - as if their enemies wouldn't take advantage of their distraction and set operations into motion.

But despite all his efforts to find something of the sort, there is nothing.

So he settles into one of his pet coding projects instead.

At 11am he receives a message from Accounting wanting to clarify a particular expenditure from last month, but it unfortunately it doesn't give any details, which is annoying because that means he has to go over there and talk to them. Which is something that he  _really_  doesn't want to do.

He spends the entire walk over there trying to figure out how to get on and out of there as quickly as possible, but when he gets there, the two girls there (who seem to be taking the day to possibly create more and more paperwork for every expenditure) say that everything is fine for the Q Branch accounts and they didn't send any message.

Which means...

Someone wanted him out of the office.

He heads back at a jog, using his phone to access the door logs.

He's found who it must be - but why?

The others who are in Q Branch giggle as he enters, but he tries to ignore them as he makes his way to his office.

It's on the table.

A metallic figurine, about a foot and a half high, with a disproportionate head and chunky limbs. It's painted a silvery white.

There's a sticky note on its head that says 'Happy (late) Birthday, Q'

When he picks up the note, he sees a switch beneath and flicks it.

"Life?" The robot says. "Don't talk to me about life. All I do is make tea for you, anyway."

Q can't help but laugh at that, long and loud.

This is actually one of the best presents ever.

Bond has given him a Marvin the Paranoid Android tea and coffee machine.

 

He finds the agent in one of the firing ranges with ten handguns in various stages of disassembly in front of him.

"Did you like it then?" Bond hasn't looked up, only continued to clean each part of the Glock in his hands.

"Yes, thank you." Q hops up to sit on a clear space on the bench. "It's very depressing. Did you know that when you go to pour a cup of tea it says 'Alright. But I won't enjoy it.' And then the tea comes out of his hand."

Bond flashes a smile at him. "You'll have to show me. I'm glad that you like it. Even if the door thing wasn't because of Hitchhiker's, I thought you'd probably be a fan anyway. And you never turn down tea."

He's kind of shocked that Bond has put so much thought into this, and his crush has just grown exponentially worse because he's done this on top of everything else and his brain just can't process it.

He picks up the Beretta next to him, which appears to have already been cleaned, instead, and begins sliding it together.

They work through the guns methodically, Bond cleaning and Q reassembling them.

"Thank you for the present, Bond."

The agent looks up from the last gun with a slightly surprised look. Q continues before his brain can stop himself. "Thanks for making it for my birthday."

Bond's eyes clear and Q realises that he understands. He  _knows_.

But he pushes the thought away and picks up another gun.

Once all are finished, Bond moves them over to one of the booths.

Q hops down from the bench, unsure of whether their conversation is over or not.

"Come on, Q," the blond man says. "I want to see if I can test the whole armoury without anyone around to tell me off for it."

"You do realise that  _I_  am someone who could tell you off for it, don't you?"

Bond grins. "Please, you enjoy shooting. I've seen you in the lab."

"Correction: I enjoy destroying things so that I can work out how to prevent it from happening."

"You'll be getting a whole lot of data for calculating my moves and chances of survival and how likely it is I can complete my mission objective before I'm fatally injured."

Q sighs, because in this case the other man is correct. "Just shoot, Bond." Besides, Bond is wearing rather fitting clothes today, and his muscles work  _beautifully_  when he's shooting like he is now.

So he sits and watches as Bond goes through the selection of handguns and destroy several targets. His mind wanders, though, back to the present and the last month and everything -

He waits until the agent lowers the Smith & Wesson in his hands to reload before saying, “Bond?”

He turns around, and for a second Q is surprised that he is actually heard through the earmuffs, before he remembers that Bond is wearing an earpiece underneath them and there are directional microphones facing away from the range exactly for this purpose.

“Yes?”

“What exactly did it say in my file?”

Bond places the gun down on the bench beside him and slides the earmuffs and safety glasses off completely.

“In your normal file,  _Adam Smith_ , nothing.”

“Ah.”

“The only reason I checked in the first place was because I always do, just to have a look at experience and all that, but yours was just simple. Nothing, a pile of dates and fake awards. And I knew you were perfectly qualified, but I was curious- and I didn’t think there would be anything awful in there.”

Q took a minute to let it sink in before waving a hand for Bond to continue.

“I figured that if there was a copy, M would be the one to have it - the only one, I thought, but I hadn’t counted on Psych - and he did, on paper, locked in one of his safes. So I took it, and read it- I didn’t intend to invade privacy - well, I did. But not so much. Only how you came to be here.”

“I see.” Q takes a deep breath. Bond knows, he knows more than he thought anyone did, and now- now, he has no idea what he should do. “I need to think. Just- go back to shooting, alright?”

He does so, and Q is left sitting there, mind running over all of the information that Bond has given him.

It’s too much, in fact, all at once, so Q fetches a couple of guns and ammunition for himself and sets himself up in one of the booths.

It’s fairly relaxing to just shoot, punch holes in the targets while his brain works away at everything.

Things that he does know are: a) that Bond is a nosy bastard, b) that he seems at least somewhat genuinely guilty about reading Q’s file, and c) he must have known for some time, given that the chances of his actions during the last twenty four days or so being a coincidence are extremely low.

Things that he  _doesn’t_  know are: a) exactly how much is that his file has in it in the first place, given as it was almost certainly compiled by the old M, and he’s never seen a whiff of it on the computers, b) exactly how much of the file that Bond has in fact  _read_ , c) what the hell Bond is planning on doing with this information, and d) why it seems like Bond is actually helping him out with all this.

And one thing that Q has absolutely no fucking idea about is why the hell this all hasn’t really made him like Bond any less.

By this time his aim is totally off and he’s shooting the target in the kneecaps, so he steps back from the range and begins dismantling the guns for cleaning again.

“And you never actually answered my question, Bond.” he calls.

After a minute or so the man appears from around the divider between booths. “Can we talk about this somewhere that we aren’t surrounded by guns? I’m not exactly begging to be killed, as much as it may seem so.”

Admittedly, Q does find the thought of him being able to kill a trained killer in the flesh rather amusing. “I suppose so. But if I do end up feeling like killing you, there are so many ways I could do so which nobody would ever think was more than a freak accident.”

Bond grins, flashing teeth like a shark. “Would showing you the best Vietnamese restaurant in the city help me get back in your good books?”

Q smiles back. “Maybe.”

 

The restaurant, it turns out, is owned and managed by Kelly’s mother, and Q feels a little guilty that Bond knows more about one of his Q Branch employees than he does - but then it turns out that Kelly is one of Bond’s conquests and she told him about it and brought him here sometime after, so he feels (slightly) better.

Bond orders ‘Banh Khot’ and ‘Bun bo Hue’ for the both of them, which Q has to take his word for, because the agent speaks in perfect Vietnamese, smiling charmingly at the young waitress, who beams at him and flutters off to get their drinks. When she comes back, Q is relieved to find that Bond has only asked for water, as he wouldn’t have put it past him to order alcohol at 2pm.

“So,” Bond says after taking a sip of water. “You wanted to know what was in your file.”

“Yeah. Well, how much of it you read. I can guess what is in most of it, but I don’t know how much you actually saw.”

“From the beginning?” Q nods and Bond sighs but begins to speak. “Isaac Samuels, reported to the police as left on a doorstep on the morning of the 24th of December, 1988, which was used as the official birth date, and submitted to hospital. Hospital records show traces of heroin in bloodstream. Was not adopted - possibly due to this?” He looks questioningly at Q, who nods, rather reluctantly, and Bond continues. “Mother identified using DNA in early 2000, found murdered later that year, father not identified until two years ago. Given into care of foster home. School grades reasonable.”

Bond looks at him, and Q realises what is coming next. “Moved foster home with the only submitted reason being ‘homosexual’ just before Christmas 2005.” There is slight tightening in the agent’s jaw. “I’m sorry.”

Q shrugs as the food is brought out and placed in front of them. It looks incredible. “You’re not the one who made me look like I attacked you with my faggot ways, to make sure that you weren’t kicked out.”

“He seriously-”

“Yeah.” Q takes one of the mini pancake things and pops it in his mouth and it’s actually so fucking delicious- “Do you think we could pay Kelly just to bring in meals for me every day?”

Bond chuckles. “We’re talking about this, and you’re concentrating on the food.” He spoons some of the soup into his bowl. “Fair enough, though.”

“It was eight years ago, Bond, and I got my own back.”

They eat in silence for a few minutes. “That gang - that Nathan guy?”

“Mmhmm. He was kind of an idiot. My work was basically the main reason for his having any kind of position other than ‘thug’ in the gang. You’re remembering all this rather well.”

“It’s part of training, you know that.”

Q doesn’t bother to answer because he’s too busy eating the best food he’s had in weeks, due to limited food options.

Eventually, though, he starts to slow down. “Do you want me to keep going?”

“Until you get to the end, yeah.”

“Police report: Involvement in supplying technology to gang supported by several members, including individual from the same foster home. As technology was used to convict several criminals and Intelligence expressing an interest, tabs kept on subject, no contact to be made. Completely separately, in December 2006, statement filed against Cameron Elliott for sexual assault, charges never made.” Q looks down at the food in front of him. “December 2010, power cuts of an approximate six kilometre diameter traced back to subject’s computer. Having proved some skill, test is set using a known associate’s arrest, and test is successful. 2009, December,  _again_. Domestic disturbance at an address leased to a Luke Elliott, younger brother of earlier mentioned Cameron. Neighbours reported yelling and noises that worried them at around midnight, so police investigated to find subject and Luke Elliott in a shouting match. Both were warned and subject left. I didn’t read any further.”

“Well, you read most of it.”

“It’s just reports, Q. It doesn’t tell me anything except that your Decembers always turn out to be shit.”

“For starters, even if I had felt that I could go through with charging Cameron, I couldn’t have because I tasered him before he could do much more than get his hand down my pants.”

Bond looks amused. “Your own creation?”

“Modified my phone. The power outage the next year was a coding mistake, because I hadn’t been able to sleep.”

“And Luke?”

Q sighs. “Luke was good to me. I’d never found out Cameron’s name, I had no idea that they were brothers. Luke helped me get over all of that, because I was still freaked out by things, and he was so sweet. But we didn’t know, not until I went over for dinner, and  _he_  was there-”

“Q-”

“And Luke believed him, which was understandable, because they were brothers, but he didn’t even consider - and what reason would I have to lie about it? So I went over to his house when he shouldn’t have been there to pick up some things I’d left but he was there and we had an argument-”

“Q!” Bond’s hands close over his and he realises that they were clenching and unclenching and his voice was growing louder and faster. He looks up at Bond, who looks uncharacteristically concerned.

“Sorry, I’ve only really talked about this once, to a couple of friends, when it happened. Never said a word to anyone after, not even the guys I dated.”

“No- Christ, I really shouldn’t have pried. But it’s alright, Q. You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want- and you know that I have a licence to kill, right?”

Q laughs. “I doubt that’ll be necessary, 007. Besides, I can do more-”

“In your pyjamas before your first cup of tea than I can do in a year in the field, I know.”

Q lets himself smirk. “Maybe six months.”

“Glad to see that I’ve gone up in your estimation.”

They grin at each other for a few moments before Q looks back down and realises that his hands are still surrounded by Bond’s. The other man seems to realise this at the same time and releases them.

“Anyway, I think you’ve been doing more than your fair share in helping me out - you noticed my awful luck with December.”

“I suppose I may have done a little,” Bond admits.

“Daretz? You spoke to him, didn’t you. And you haven’t mentioned Christmas to me at all, I think, whereas it’s all anyone else has talked about. Also, I’m not sure whether it was intentional or not, but for once your ability to destroy every piece of equipment you touch, plus your requests, have kept me busier than I would have otherwise been.”

“Does this mean I get something new?” Bond asks laughingly.

“No.”

 

They finish eating, but before they leave, the waitress comes back with an middle-aged woman, who proceeds to talk to Bond for five minutes or so before waving them off.

He’s glad that they decide to walk back, because even though it’s kind of bitterly cold, it’s not that far to walk and there’s absolutely no one outside and it is actually glorious. So maybe Bond looks at him a little funny, because Q is kind of giggly by the time they get back to HQ because he’s barely had to look at people and his face is freezing off and Bond is actually being really nice, which is weird, but awesome.

They head back to the firing range, where Bond picks out another series of guns and sets up a system of moving targets. Q watches some more as he shoots for a while, and all of a sudden Bond turns to face him and says “Your shooting before was terrible by the end, it’s your turn.”

“I was thinking about other things,” Q briefly protests, but steps forward and takes the Browning pistol that Bond hands him. He sets himself up and empties the clip into various targets with reasonable accuracy and precision.

When he turns around, the agent is frowning. “Bloody hell, Q, you don’t have to be so perfect with your posture.”

“Excuse me?”

Bond ignores him and moves toward him, his hands adjusting his positioning ever so slightly, manipulating his body with ease. “Don’t be so rigid and stiff. You can’t go entirely by the book on this, you need to react and  _move_.”

"Going by the book, being structured and calculating has generally worked for me in the past, Bond. Not my emotions."

"Who said anything about emotions? They're for life, Q, not for killing. Instinct is important. And you call me James in the middle of missions sometimes, so I think you ought to be able to do so face to face by now."

"Well maybe instinct tells me that I don't feel like calling you James." (It isn’t. It’s screaming at him to let Bond fuck him against a wall until he shouts Bond’s first name into the empty space of the firing range. So Q is definitely not going to listen to his instinct right now.)

 

The rest of the afternoon is spent trying out each of the firearms in the range, Q watching most of the time, occasionally letting Bond try to ‘teach him how to shoot properly’ until he gets too annoyed and goes back to perving on Bond’s arse and back.

Around five in the afternoon Q’s phone beeps with a message from Q Branch, and he groans out loud.

Bond turns around. “What is it?”

“I have to go back to work, something’s come up.” He slides off of the bench where he’s been sitting cross legged and stretches his legs. “Thank you, for today, even if you did read my file.”

“It’s been no problem.”

“Well, I’ll see you sometime later, no doubt.”

Bond inclines his head. “I’ll come by just when you don’t want me to.”

Q laughs. “I look forward to it then.” He turns around before things can get really awkward as he somehow always manages to make them, and heads for the exit.

“Oh, and Q?” Bond says, just as he’s about to walk out the door.

“Yes?”

“You have  _terrible_  taste in men.”

Q shrugs. “I thought that was a given. After all, I like you, don’t I, James?” He smiles as he gives in to stupid ideas (hey, it’s Christmas,) and slips out into the corridor.


	26. And a Happy New Year? (2013)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There are worse things than bringing the new year with a certain British agent

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A new year chapter for you all  
> And finally, some fun to be had.  
> (This actually is the last chapter this time)

December the 31st, 2013

 

Q isn’t exactly sure what’s happening.

On Christmas Day he blabbed to Bond that he liked him and then left the firing range without giving Bond time to speak, having been summoned back to Q Branch.

 

\---

“What’s going on?” Q asks as he enters Q Branch.

“002-”

“GUESS WHAT MY SISTER TEXTED ME EARLIER, Q!” Kelly’s voice rings out from across the room, and Q winces as she comes bounding towards him. “She said that Bond was at the restaurant, with a _guy_ , who was described as having dark curly hair and glasses, and you weren’t in the building. It was totally you, wasn’t it?”

“I’m not allowed to have lunch with a coworker? That’s not the only reason you called me up here, right?”

“She said that you were holding hands!”

“It wasn’t _holding hands_ holding hands, it was _stop freaking out_ holding hands. And why the hell would you care, anyway?”

“You have to wait until Valentine’s Day, Q. Just wait till February!”

Q rubs the bridge of his nose. “Kelly, I have no idea what you’re talking about, but can someone just tell me if there’s something important going on?”

“Ah, sir, 002 is having a little trouble-”

“Thank you, I’ll check it out.” He stalks away to his office and tried to ignore the others’ hisses to Kelly.

\---

 

The other Q Branchers are acting weirdly and Bond hasn’t acted any differently to normal, although everything seems to have started happening again and so they’re actually fairly busy, so he hasn’t actually had time to talk to Bond about anything that happened or that they talked about that day.

Eve, on the other hand, _makes_ time to talk to Q, in that she drags him out of the office and asks him point blank whether he and Bond and having sex yet. She seems rather disappointed when he replies to the negative, seeing as she, too, has heard the rumour that they went out to lunch on _Christmas Day_.

So it’s all just plain _odd_ and Q wishes that it would all go back to normal so that they can get some fucking work done without someone being annoying.

At least it’s no longer Christmas time, and all he had to do is get through this one day before the new year begins.

He should expect things to not go to plan when Bond strides in at eight o’clock in the morning and stands in Q’s office doorway. “Q, please tell me that you have a suit.”

Confused as to why Bond would be asking the question, Q stares at him for a second. “I have suit for funeral and for boring government meetings-”

“Bloody hell,” interrupts Bond. “Your size won’t have changed since your last checkup with Medical, right?”

Q’s eyes narrow. “I was there less than two weeks ago, so I doubt it.”

“Good, they can use that then.” Bond turns around and begins to walk away, but Q needs to have some idea of what’s going on.

“What’s this for, Bond?”

The blond agent swivels and grins at him. “It’s New Year’s Eve, and there’s work to be done.”

“So?”

“You’re my date.”

Bond escapes the room while Q is still gaping like a fish.

 

Q calls Eve on his way to see her and demand an explanation because what the fuck, but she meets him half way there and drags him back down to his office.

“Even though it’s an in-Britain op, we’re still handling it rather than MI5 because Bond knows the assassin in question.”

“So why am I going?”

Eve smirks. “Bond needed a date, and-”

“What about you?”

“I’m busy tonight. And anyway, this assassin - Libena Vesely - she’s Czech.”

“So? What- oh, no. Please tell me that she doesn’t know Macek.”

“We don’t know if Renáta Macek _is_ going to be there. The invitations are named, which is the only reason why we know that Vesely will be there, though it is odd that it would be under her own name, but Macek would definitely not go as herself.”

“Yes, I know. So I’m going as peace offering in case Renáta does turn up.”

Eve grimaces. “Well - I wouldn’t say peace offering. Perhaps a mediator of sorts, Bond has the impression that she firmly dislikes him, at least from their subsequent meetings.”

“She did shoot him in the leg when he interrupted her business deal in October.”

“Exactly. And we can’t let a known killer like Libena Vesely attending government functions unchecked, especially when we have no idea how she was issued with an invitation.”

Q turns back to his computer. “I can find that out.”

“Go ahead, just don’t forget that you’ve got a fitting at eleven, and another at four.”

“A fitting?”

“For your suit, Q. It’s been made to your measurements, and it’s been ready - well, aside from a few adjustments - for a while.”

“… Why?”

“For times like these, obviously. If you’re late I’ll get Bond along to sit in just to make you uncomfortable.”

“I’ll be there on time.”

Eve exits with a satisfied smile and Q fights the urge to run.

 

The fitting for the suit isn’t actually too bad - well, except that he has to have two, and that while he’s there they ask if he would like to do fittings for the rest of the suits that they have begun to make for him.

_Why._

Mind you, the suit is nice. _Really_ nice, but he still wishes that he didn’t supposedly need it.

 

By the time evening rolls around, he’s annoyed with everything and a little bit nervous and _absolutely_ not excited at all.

He does have to admit that the suit does actually look good on him, even if it does make him look thinner than ever, and the material does feel nice on his skin, but that doesn’t mean that he’s comfortable in it.

He’s standing in Q Branch, where he’s been wolf-whistled by his staff and refused tea in case he spills it on himself, when Bond walks in.

Q is used to seeing the agent in a suit, given that he’s _always_ wearing them, but this one even Q can tell is impeccably tailored and it looks absolutely fantastic. It also makes Bond look like sex incarnate and Q look very average beside him.

And he’s glad that he’s holding his jacket over his arm in front of his body.

Bond looks him up and down and smiles slowly, lips curving wickedly in a practised seductive motion.

Correction: He is _very_ glad that he’s holding his jacket.

“You look good, Q. The suit’s nice.”

Q snorts. “Aren’t you the one that picked it?”

Bond shrugs. “It wouldn’t look any good by itself, though, would it?” He holds out his arm. “Shall we go?”

Rolling his eyes, Q joins him at the doorway. “I’m not going to go on your bloody arm, 007. Can we get this over with?”

Bond just nods, and both of them ignore Eve’s call of “What about photos?”

 

By the time they get to the MI6 carpark, Q can safely put his jacket on, having kept his mind firmly on the budgetary concerns of Q Branch, which is enough of a distressing subject to make his erection go down.

The car that Bond shows him to is the agent’s favourite: the Aston Martin DB5 which he’d bought himself and then handed over to Q Branch for fitting out. ( _Git._ ) Aside from discussing the modifications that have been made to the car, and those that Bond would like made to the car, they spend the drive without much talking, and Q doesn’t exactly want to raise what he said on Christmas day, so it feels kind of awkward.

 

Inside the hotel where the function itself is, Q feels even more out of place, surrounded by all these men and women in their elegant suits and dresses. But then Bond’s hand is pressing lightly on his lower back and guides him casually through the crowds to the bar, where Bond orders two vodka martinis.

“Is it really a good idea to drink?” Q asks, simply because he has nothing else to say. It’s not like he doesn’t know that Bond is always drinking on the job.

“No way to get through this kind of thing without it.”

Q sits on a stool, and tries not to notice how Bond’s trousers cling to his muscled thighs as he leans against the bar beside him.

“So what the hell do we do, anyway?”

Bond takes a sip of his drink. “Wait for Vesely or Macek to turn up. Drink.” He looks over at Q, a smile quirking his features. “Dance, if you’d like.”

“No thanks.” Q shivers. “I can’t dance for shit.”

“I bet you could if you tried. Or had the right partner.”

“No way am I getting on that dancefloor, Bond.” He pulls out his phone to check whether the cameras have picked up anyone that look like the two women that they are waiting for.

 

At eleven Bond comes back from doing his socialising and pulls Q out onto the dancefloor. His hands are firm on his hand and waist, and guides him through the steps with his body and it’s weird because he’s dancing, but really Bond is dancing and moving Q’s body.

For the first few minutes he simply keeps a stream of curse words running under his breath at Bond, who chuckles, but then he kind of settles into the rhythm and habit of the steps and can do something other than concentrate on that.

“They all think I’m an exec who is very boring except for the fact that I’ve brought my incredibly beautiful toy-boy along for the evening, so I thought I’d show you off a little.”

“You’re a bastard.”

“Taking back what you said on the twenty fifth?”

Q stumbles a little and Bond’s arm tightens around him in response, pulling him closer.

They’re a little too close, in Q’s opinion, for being in public while Bond looks like he does, and it’s a little unnerving looking up into Bond’s bright blue eyes from this close.

“No,” he says after a moment. “You’ve always been a bastard, if that was going to have any effect, it would have done before now.”

Bond looks pleased. “Have I told you that you look beautiful?”

“Don’t try anything with me, Bond. We’re on a job.”

There’s a cough in his ear and Q remembers that they’re both wearing earpieces and Zach must have just heard what they were saying-

“Well, both of them have just walked in.”

He can see the moment that Bond switches back into mission mode properly - which is surprising, because he hadn’t noticed that he _wasn’t_ in it, but he supposes that there isn’t much difference between regular Bond and mission Bond anyway.

The agent slowly heads their dancing back towards the crowd’s edge so that they can find a quiet space on the room’s edge so that they can search her out properly. However, they walk out of the denser crowd and run into them almost immediately.

They’re both wearing full length gowns, Macek’s a midnight blue and Vesely’s a brilliant scarlet, but otherwise the two of them look entirely different. Vesely’s is a very fashionable beauty, tumbling blonde hair and tanned skin and a brilliant smile, while Macek’s black hair is caught in an updo and she is utterly devoid of jewellery.

Macek lights up, though, a clever gleam in her eyes at the sight of Q and Bond.

“ _Adam_ , darling.”

Bond stiffens beside him as she descends upon them, kissing Q lightly on both cheeks while Vesely shakes Bond’s hand. “Oh, James Bond, stop hating me. I only shot you in the leg. Be glad I didn’t kill you.”

“I’m hard to kill.”

She shrugs and turns to Vesely. “Libena - you know James already, you had the same target once, didn’t you? And this is Adam, the one I mentioned.”

The blonde shakes his hand and says, “Pleasure,” but almost immediately her eyes are looking away, as if searching for someone.

Macek rolls her eyes and pushes her lightly on the arm. “Go.” Vesely beams at her and hurries off as Macek turns back to face Bond and Q. “A drink, perhaps?”

At the bar, they order another three martinis and Bond stares at Macek until she sighs. “We’re not here on business.”

“Then why are you here.”

She shrugs elegantly. “Libena. She is suitably named, the silly girl.”

“What-” Bond frowns. “Love? Really?”

“Apparently. She insisted in coming over for New Year’s Eve, she has some obsession with the kiss at midnight and staying together for the whole year thing. But they seem to have a good relationship, even with Libena’s work. It’s disappointing, really.”

“What, that she’s fallen in love?” Q asks.

“Not necessarily. But she’s going to have to leave the business because of it, probably. She’ll go off to be a wife to a diplomat and I’ll be all alone.”

“In your _castle_ ,” Bond replies scathingly.

“Castles are lonely. Now, maybe if Adam would come back with me-” she pats his leg.

“I don’t think so.” Bond growls.

“I know, I know. I’m not his type, and besides, I suspect that he is a little more important to your organisation than is known to a lot of people, yes? Not that I care.”

“Renáta, I don’t believe that my position is any of your business.” Q says evenly.

She waves a hand. “No, I really didn’t mean to- Just that your official profile is very bare. And you are far too intelligent to be a mere handler. Far too intelligent for this one,” she says, indicating Bond, which makes Q smile.

“Obviously.”

“But not intelligent enough to not like him.” She grins knowingly.

Q’a face pinkens. “I suppose not.”

“I’m very flattered by all this, believe me, but will you explain why _you_ are here?” Bond is looking rather impatient with the both of them.

“For Libena, obviously. She’s like a sister to me. And besides, I could always do with meeting new people.”

“You mean new-”

“Renáta!” A called name interrupts Bond’s words as Vesely sashays towards them, a woman, short and dark haired, probably in her late twenties, following.

“Rena, this is Caro. Caro, this is Renáta.”

The two women exchange greetings and Renáta waves a hand at Q and Bond. “Adam Smith and James Bond, some friends of mine.”

Q feels Bond’s hand rest on his back again.

Caro shakes their hands, glancing curiously at Bond. “You’re in the same business as Libby, right?” When Bond stares at her stone faced she back tracks. “It’s just I’m part of the British Embassy in Lisbon, I thought I saw you there a couple of months back.”

Finally Bond nods. “Yes, we do a little of the same work.”

“I’m just here as his date,” Q says cheerfully.

The hand slides around to rest against his waist and Q is pulled closer to Bond as a result. “Never just a date, darling,” Bond mutters in a supposedly low voice, before turning to the others. “We’ll leave you three alone, then.”

The three women smile, Renáta winks at Q and makes a little shooing motion and just before James leads him off, Vesely says, “Don’t forget the midnight kiss!”

“Thank god that’s over,” Q says with great relief. “Can we leave now?”

“We’ll dance a little, then go. We don’t want to look like we were only here to speak to them.”

Q groans as he’s pulled onto the dancefloor once again. “I was hoping that I could get out of this damned suit sometime soon.”

The arm around him tightens and he’s cinched to Bond. “Don’t say things like that, or they’ll happen in the meaning that you didn’t intend.”

As they rotate slowly, Bond rubs against him, a thick erection against his thigh, and Q’s own body responds much too easily, and Q finds himself remembering that it has been far too long since he had any kind of sexual encounter that wasn’t with his hands and he _really_ needs to stop thinking about it-

Bond lowers his head slightly to murmur into Q’s ear, “If we play the sex-crazed lovers we can get out quicker-”

“Fuck, _please_ ,” Q answers, not entirely thinking, and Bond removes him from the crowd so swiftly that within a couple of minutes they’re out of the giant function room and he’s fairly sure that they didn’t actually push through people rudely which is rather a surprise, but he’s still kind of pressed up against Bond.

“Better?” the other man asks.

Q nods. “Christ, I hate people sometimes. It was so crowded.” It’s good to be out in the almost-deserted corridor.

“I don’t suppose inclined to let me help you out of that suit, then.”

“Not tonight, Bond, not tonight.” He pulls out his phone to check the time and finds that it’s 11:48. “Which doesn’t mean I’m not averse to other things. I enjoy fireworks, so you have twelve minutes to find me a good vantage point. Preferably deserted.”

Bond looks at him, and smiles, and Q suddenly feels like he shouldn’t have just put that particularly off into the man’s hands. “Easy. Are you afraid of heights, or just flying?”

They take the nearby service stairs to the next floor, where Q hacks into the elevator programming and makes it take them up to the top floor without a room key card as normally required. It’s child’s play to get through the door to the roof as well, even when he declines Bond’s offer of shooting the lock off, seeing as they want to get through relatively undetected by security.

There’s a brilliant view of the city, all lights and darkness, and the wind is bloody freezing, but it doesn’t matter.

Because Bond is pressed up behind him, his hands on Q’s hips and lips on his neck and pressing against his arse through their trousers.

And _fuck_ , it feels good.

Before long, Bond has him turned around, kissing him properly, _finally_ , and Q’s been wanting this for so long, waiting, and it’s better than he thought, and Bond’s tongue is deep in his mouth and his hands are massaging his arse. Q has just enough thought capacity left to walk them both back until his back hits the wall of the building surrounding the stairwell, and Bond attacks him with renewed passion.

He’s being touched and kissed and caressed and Bond’s has loosened his tie and undone the first few buttons of his shirt and now his hands are going down his pants, and all Q has done is untuck Bond’s shirt because he’s enjoying sliding his hands over Bond’s abs far too much.

He’s about to follow suit and undo the agent’s belt when Bond steps away. Q opens his mouth to protest and Bond drops to his knees, slides Q’s trousers and underwear down and takes his erection into his mouth.

Q’s head falls back against the wall.

Bond is good at giving head, especially for someone who spends most of his time in bed with women.

And then that reminds him that James Bond is giving him a blowjob on the roof of a hotel with various members of the British Government, their employers, at a party downstairs. And it’s freezing and Bond’s mouth is so fucking hot-

And when he looks down his eyes are gleaming bright blue-

And he can’t actually concentrate anymore, and it takes all his control to keep his fingers pressed into the rough brick of the wall, rather than getting Bond’s head back on him when he slides off and teases.

The fireworks starting makes it worse somehow, the explosions in the air reminiscent of work and the bright light and Bond just sucks him harder and moves faster.

He is aware enough to realise when he can’t take it much longer and tries to let James know but honestly by the time he comes his mind is pretty much gone and he only barely registers the loss of his mouth and the presence of Bond’s hand bringing him to release.

When his brain jolts back into gear, he has been tucked back inside his trousers and he’s wrapped in Bond’s arms.

“Jesus,” is about all he can manage.

“As much as the promotion to son of god is an honour, I think I prefer to hear ‘James’ falling from those lovely lips of yours. I quite enjoyed hearing it.”

Q considers being annoyed at himself for breaking his rule about saying ‘James’ but considering that his cock has just been in the man’s mouth, that rule and all others about attempting to be impersonal with Bond have pretty much gone out the window.

“Sorry about… being crap now. Not being able to reciprocate. I’m just- you’re fucking good at that.”

Bond - James - laughs and opens the door to the stairwell. “It was my pleasure.”

“Next time I will, don’t worry. Y’know, when it hasn’t been like a year since I slept with someone.”

Bond’s arm is back around his waist, because Q is still not completely sure of his feet and probably won’t be for a while. “I can’t wait.”

By the time they walk out of the elevator on the ground floor, Q is a little embarrassed of himself, but Bond’s arm is still around him and doesn’t mind when Q says that he’ll take a cab home, he doesn’t want to put Bond out (and both of them know that really he’s not ready to give Bond his address).

“You don’t mind if I hold you to there being a next time?” Bond asks as he waves down a taxi, which miraculously stops.

“If you don’t mind that I hold you to it too.”

“Not at all.”

“I might see you tomorrow, then.”

Bond nods, and just as Q is about to slide into the taxi he grabs his arm and kisses him firmly. “Happy New Year, Q,” he murmurs as they break apart.

There is something in his eyes that warms Q’s soul. “For you as well, James.”

 

In the cab, Q lets himself smile.

A happy new year.

  
  



End file.
